Just Pay Micah Parsons You Idiot
Not that I’m complaining about their suffering, but it must be deeply frustrating to be a Cowboys fan in the past decade plus.
The Cowboys have not spent the last 25 years as a laughingstock bottom-feeder. They’ve occasionally had disaster seasons but overall the Cowboys generally seem to compete for the division, make the playoffs on a respectable basis, and draft well. They’ve had 2 quality franchise QBs in that time, both gems they found hidden in the rough. The Cowboys are not an incompetently run franchise. And yet, they’ve consistently failed to get over the top.
They’ve barely won any of the many playoff games they’ve made in that time frame and have not reached a conference title game since the 90’s. They have had very questionable coaching over that same period, the most competent maybe being late career Bill Parcells? Maybe Wade Phillips? Years and years of Jason Garrett, a successful yet playoffs-imploding run with Mike McCarthy, and now they are pretending Brian Schottenheimer is going to be good.
Okay enough wasting your time the problem is Jerry Jones. Jerry Jones is the boulder that the Sisyphus franchise must push against every year. Jerry Jones is a rich asshole who bought a team, made one very smart decision (Let Jimmy Johnson do his thing) and has been making damaging decisions since. The Cowboys have frequently been good in spite of him. He’s not completely incompetent, the Cowboys do tend to draft well, but I have my doubts about how much influence Jerry has had on draft strategy for a while. One of the ways his incompetence has hindered the Cowboys, especially in recent years, is how he negotiates his player contracts. He’s dumb!
Jerry keeps playing pointless hardball with blue chip players for no reason. The rookie wage scale and salary cap have made it advantageous for teams to wait on a guy as long as they can so they don’t cripple the team with a few select massive contracts and have a lot of space to build with youth. But with this comes a drawback: the longer you wait, the more you will have to eventually pay up to keep a guy. So smart teams (like the Eagles) have started doing a smart thing: recognizing when you hit on a guy worth building around, and extending him as early as feels reasonable. This impacts the salary cap space you have in the short term, but it is forward-thinking and helps the team in the long term.
Because, the longer you wait, the higher the market rises, and the more impactful that contract needs to be to make that player happy. The Chiefs made Patrick Mahomes the highest-paid player in NFL history in his 4th year of his rookie contract. Now, Patrick Mahomes was worth that. But the Chiefs were thinking ahead on it, because they knew they had the guy, and they knew the cap would continue to rise over his fairly long contract time. Mahomes isn’t even in the top 10 highest-paid QB contracts now. The Chiefs have our current era’s GOAT making less yearly money than dudes who haven’t even won playoff games yet, like Herbert or Tua. The contract future-proofed the team. They gave a worthy contract to a blue chip superstar and in just a few years he looks like a bargain.
Wanna know who the highest-paid QB is this year? It’s Dak. Because Jerry is a fuckin idiot and waits as long as possible to pay guys he cannot afford to let walk. GMs are recognizing when they have something and going to make that guy happy to keep him around and get ahead of the position market rise. When you have a foundational piece, you pay them. You extend them early, you extend them often (provided they keep being worth it), and you enjoy the profits this allows you to employ down the road. Howie Roseman is a master at this, fully employing void years into big contract extensions that essentially allow him to just keep punting the ball down the road while making his guys happy. For all the shit Joe Schoen gets, his smartest move was signing Dexter Lawrence to a big extension very early, making one of the best DTs in football right now a bargain.
Meanwhile down in Arlington, Jerry Jones is staring at one of the most game-wrecking defenders in the entire league and playing hardball. Fucking why? Did your decrepit old ass learn nothing from waiting till the last possible seconds last year to extend Dak and CeeDee? Since the offseason hit, the Browns extended Myles Garrett after what felt like a very brief conflict. The Raiders extended Maxx Crosby. The Steelers just extended TJ Watt. The Cowboys could have extended LITERAL SUPERSTAR Micah Parsons before any of them, still given him a massive contract that makes him happy, and saved a ton of current and future cap space. I understand playing hardball with most players. A borderline star might command a contract that isn’t in the team’s best interest, so waiting till the last possible moment makes some sense as a negotiation tactic. But not for blue chip guys. Not for guys you cannot afford to lose, like fucking Micah Parsons.
I have no doubt Parsons will get his paycheck and be a Cowboy. It’ll be huge. He’ll probably reset the market for rushers. All this stalling and time wasting will just hurt the Cowboys. If Jerry had just…paid up months ago, they could have been in a better place. Instead, just like last year, it’ll go on so long that people will start to speculate that Parsons will just walk away (he wont).
I hope Jerry continues to manage the Cowboys for many years to come. As long as he’s there, that boulder is going to keep rolling back down.
Oh Christ on actual Fire, I am thoroughly done with modern isekai animu. Two of my favourites from the 90s are almost the birth of the genre (Fire Tripper, El-Hazard), but it’s not so much reached saturation point as lapped itself six times.
A couple of weeks back I picked up on a series called Turkey!, after Piro (the MegaTokyo chap) mentioned it on the ol’ Bluske there – his son’s the captain of his highschool bowling team. I like a bit of tenpin, so I gave it a shot. Bit angsty in the first episode, but it gets to the start of ep 2 and GODS BOLLOCK IT ANOTHER SODDING ISEKAI…
Well, is it any good? Just because it is an isekai doesn’t mean it is bad.
This is like bemoaning the fact the fact almost all fantasy stories take inspiration from medieval Europe and Tolkien.
I hate to say what I am about to say, but it needs to be said.
If the Cowboys can just win one Super Bowl in the next 10 years, it will shut Stephen A. Smith the fuck up, and I am willing to accept that sacrifice.
But is that worth Skip Bayless living with a big smug grin on his face for the rest of his life?
I value Skip’s misery far too much to want the Cowboys to succeed. Watching him seethe for three straight hours during a particularly bad loss makes my day sometimes.
Stephen A will never shut the fuck up
I enjoy every second of cowboy fans suffering, almost as much as I enjoy yankee fans suffering
There’s a good amount of overlap in there. Toss in Laker fans and you’re not adding that many people.
Jerry Jones is the quintessential example of why owners should not also function as GMs. Jerry Jones can’t fire himself so the Cowboys are basically stuck having to try to work around this nonsense until he dies. It’s hard to believe that he’s still doing this nonsense even after watching Washington end their NFCCG drought before his team could. You’d think he’d get it after seeing the Giants and Eagles both win multiple titles over that span!
Also it’s funny that you brought up the Mahomes deal. I was talking with a friend about that recently and mentioned how good of a contract that was for KC. I knew he was outside the T-5 highest paid QBs, but I nearly fell out of my chair when he informed me that he was 14th. Just a ridiculous value deal that only looks crazy because of the half-billion dollar price tag. A $500mil bargain.
I just want to point out that the phrase “current era’s GOAT” is an oxymoron.
ur an oxymoron
We thought Bart Starr was always going to be the best.
We thought Bradshaw was always going to be the best.
We thought Montana was always going to be the best.
We thought Peyton was always going to be the best.
Mahomes needn’t get so comfy. There’s always going to be someone better eventually. All you can ever hope to be is… [shrug]… the current era’s GOAT.
Instead of “current era’s GOAT”, how about we use:
GOTE: Greatest Of This Era, or
GOHT: Greatest Of His/Her Time.
The best part is, GOTE and GOHT are still pronounced “GOAT”.
Or just tweak it slightly to Greatest Of Their Hourage and call em all GOTHs.
Did Jerry Jones learn the word isekai from Dez Bryant?
Goblins are real.
Barely related, but happy comic #1600! Another fun milestone for a fairly long-lived webcomic.
Of course, once you get to 1600 of anything, it’s hard to count them all exactly. I think the comics from July 18 and July 21 accidentally got double-labeled as another #1594 and #1595 instead of their actual numbers of #1597 and #1598, which threw me off when trying to verify things. Ah well.
No, that’s exactly what happened, the previous comics got mis-numbered. It usually happens to me when I have an idea and start working on a comic, but have to shelve it for a bit later for whatever reason and when I go back I forget to update the original number to the correct one.
Bring back fort elite monies, but start it over. Since “elite monies” isn’t what it used to be
Won’t be long before like Ware, he gets isekai’d to another team and wins a ring.