The fall of the house of Jerrah

I’ve watched the first three episodes of the new documentary about the 90’s Cowboys, and it’s pretty entertaining if you accept it for what it is — that is, that the price for the excellent footage and often good interviews with most of the principals is to soften the hard edges. The most annoying compromise is in the title, as reports that the series gives way too much of the credit due to Jimmy Johnson to Jerry Jones are certainly accurate. (The all-time great Herschel Walker trade is soft-pedaled in the details, and the pump-and-dump of Steve Walsh isn’t mentioned at all.) If you’re interested in that kind of thing, you should read to/listen to Jeff Pearlman’s excellent book about the same team, which will fill in the critical gaps and context.

At this point, though, Jerry is doing enough damage to his reputation himself. For years, he’s made a speciality of engaging in unnecessarily protracted and acrimonious negotiations that somehow culminate in the team paying over-market prices for their stars (and people Jerrah mistakenly believes to be stars, like Zeke Elliott.) Eventually, a player was going to get tired of these games of chicken and just jump off the sinking yacht, and as had long been signaled it’s finally happened:

BREAKING: The Cowboys have reached agreement on a trade that will send Micah Parsons to the Packers, per sources. Parsons will sign a four-year, $188 million extension with Green Bay that includes $136 million guaranteed.

[image or embed]— Dianna Russini (@diannarussini.bsky.social) Aug 28, 2025 at 2:04 PM

For the Packers, a good team with a very good coaching infrastructure that (was) lacking in truly elite talent in a thin conference, this is an incredible trade:

Quick thought on the Parsons trade: This upgrades a defense that was already quietly very good last year. Packers are now in the top tier of the NFL.

[image or embed]— Mina Kimes (@minakimes.bsky.social) Aug 28, 2025 at 2:30 PM

For the Cowboys, it brings me great pleasure to say that this is a catastrophe. This is a veteran, win-now team with those numerous luxury contracts that just traded one of the three best defensive players in the league for 40 cents on the dollar, because Jones wanted to circumvent Parsons’s agent to make a deal and took his Johnnie Walker Blue and went home when Parsons insisted on negotiating professionally.

As with so much in the MAGA era, this is essentially self-parody reaching its inevitable conclusion:

But Jerrah was never a tightwad until a few years ago; quite the opposite. He was also never an “idiot” by NFL owner standards. Many of his peers cannot be trusted to operate a toothbrush without help. Jerrah, however, built his stately pleasure dome, resurrected the flagging Cowboys brand in the early 1990s and was a better general manager than at least the bottom quartile of the men around the NFL who came to that job with actual qualifications. The attention-seeking behavior has always been there, but he used to get what he wanted with honey, not by dousing his beloved players with vinegar.

Sometime in the last few years, Jerrah stopped hardball negotiating and started simply procrastinating. His verbal filter began short-circuiting. His aphorisms went from colorful to incomprehensible. Last October, he lashed out at radio hosts he had worked with for years. The Cowboys couldn’t even conduct a coherent coaching search this offseason. Every ownership-level decision in the last two years has been an unnecessary crisis.

Then came Monday’s depressing airing of grievances at the team’s introductory press conference. Jerrah indicated that he has been slow to extend Micah Parsons because the superstar edge rusher missed “six games” last year (four, actually), then lamented paying Dak Prescott, who “got knocked out for two-thirds of the year.” Trevon Diggs and Terence Steele caught pointless strays as Jerrah cast about for justifications for not paying one of the NFL’s best players his ever-increasing market value.

“Contracts are four, five years, OK? There’s a lot of water under the bridge if you step out there and do something in the first two or three,” Jerrah said at one point. “You can get hit by a car, seriously.”

Full disclosure: I took my elderly mother shopping for necessities a few hours before Jerrah’s presser. She couldn’t decide which package of a particular product she wanted to buy at the pharmacy. In an effort to speed up a decision that was starting to take longer than the Parsons negotiations, I held up two sizes of the same product. “The larger package is a better bargain,” I explained, trying to get her to purchase a two-month supply.

“I don’t want to spend all of that money!” she said of the $14 expense. “What if I die before I use them all?”

Indeed. And what if Micah Parsons gets hit by a car?

I don’t pretend to know Jerry Jones, but I have stood face to face with him a few times and watched him swan about social functions in Indianapolis, Mobile and at Super Bowl locations. Butter used to re-solidify in the man’s mouth. He adored his players, even when he was being a sumbitch about money. Ripping Prescott to spite Parsons on the eve of camp was entirely out-of-character for the reliable caricature Jerrah once was.

For their parts, Prescott, Diggs and others have taken turns being staunch company men in the wake of a public castigation from their boss for suffering injuries in his service. (Diggs also got heat — and lost a substantial workout bonus — for not undergoing rehab at the Cowboys facility for some reason.) Parsons has the patience of St. Francis of Assisi; Trey Hendrickson would have run off to a Himalayan yurt by now. Cowboys fans, on the other hand, heckled Jerrah with “Pay Micah” chants when he addressed them (losing track of what year it was at one point) at the start of a practice.

Jerrah’s counter-motivational training-camp welcome speech has stress-tested the professionalism of his locker room. It puts the onus of culture-building on Brian Schottenheimer, a man who, despite royal lineage, hasn’t been able to find work anywhere else in the last five years. It remains to be seen how a less-than-loyal soldier like George Pickens will respond to his new environment; things could descend rapidly into a Randy Moss/Raiders situation. [Let’s hope so! –ed.]

Much better when the damage of a plutocrat’s mental decline is confined to a professional sport in Texas.