On Thursday night in Philadelphia, the Dallas Cowboys will stand on the sideline, helmets under their arms, while the Eagles raise a championship banner for the second time in seven years. It will be a ritual drenched in green and silver, an occasion of sweeping civic pride for one of the Cowboys’ fiercest rivals. For Dallas, it will be a reminder in 50ft letters: three decades have passed since America’s Team last won a Super Bowl.
And the contrast could not be sharper. For while the Eagles bask in another triumph and project the stability of an organization built for long-term success, the Cowboys stumble into the season diminished – having just traded away the one player who seemed capable of bridging the chasm between their glorious past and uncertain present.
Micah Parsons was not just Dallas’s best defensive player; he was one of the league’s few genuine game-wreckers, a two-time All-Pro edge who made quarterbacks rethink plays before the snap. Yet after a contract dispute spiraled into acrimony and commanded the pre-season news cycle, Jerry Jones traded Parsons to Green Bay last Thursday for two future first-round picks and defensive tackle Kenny Clark, a 29-year-old considered on the downside from his Pro Bowl peak.
Parsons immediately signed a four-year, $188m extension with the Packers, making him the highest-paid non-quarterback in NFL history. Jones insisted he’d offered even more guaranteed money – and Parsons’s agent, David Mulugheta, says the player’s first-choice was to stay in Dallas – but the squabble appears to have never really been about dollars. Jones had bypassed Mulugheta, trying to broker the deal one-on-one, as if his name and the star on the helmet were leverage enough. It wasn’t hardball so much as hubris: I’m Jerry, we’re the Cowboys, what more do you need? Parsons didn’t buy it, and now he’s gone.
“FLEECED” trended on X within minutes of the news. Packers general manager Brian Gutekunst called it “a big swing”, likening it to Green Bay’s historic free-agent coup of Reggie White. In Dallas, the shock was more existential. Parsons had been the most dynamic Cowboy since DeMarcus Ware; now he was playing for another NFC contender, the collateral damage in a beef between Jones and Mulugheta.
“I never wanted this chapter to end, but not everything was in my control,” Parsons wrote in a farewell message. “My heart has always been here, and still is.”
Jones, as ever, offered his own spin. He insisted Clark answered a “big concern” on run defense and compared the move to the Herschel Walker trade that had kickstarted the last Dallas dynasty in 1989. But the pitch didn’t land. Clark had been part of a Packers unit that finished in the bottom half of the league against the run last season. Dallas, with Parsons, had finished 28th in defense last year. Without him, they may soon redefine the floor.
It was, in other words, the Cowboys distilled: a headline-grabbing transaction with no clear path to a championship. Jerry called it progress. The rest of the NFL chalked it up as another episode in the longest-running soap opera in US sports.
That has been the Cowboys’ pattern ever since their last title. From 1970 to 1995 they were the NFL’s dominant force, appearing in 14 NFC Championship Games and winning five Lombardi Trophies. Since then? Not one return trip to the last four, marking the longest drought in the conference. They’ve had stars, hype and stretches of regular-season success, but every January ends the same way: with someone else lifting the trophy.
Over that span, there have always been whispers that Jones, the omnipresent owner and self-appointed general manager, prized the headlines as much as the wins. In the early years, he at least denied it. But last month, at a premiere event in Los Angeles for a Netflix docuseries about the Cowboys, the 82-year-old seemed to give away the game.
“I do believe if we’re not being looked at, then I’ll do my part to get us looked at,” Jones said. “The Cowboys are a soap opera 365 days a year. When it gets slow, I’ll stir it up. Oh, it’s wonderful to have the great athletes, have the great players, but there’s something more there: there’s sizzle, there’s emotion, and, if you will, there’s controversy. That controversy is good stuff in terms of keeping and having people’s attention.”
For the NFL’s broadcast partners, that may read like a mission statement. For Cowboys fans who have waited since Biggie and Tupac were still alive for another parade, it felt more like saying the quiet part out loud.
The last ride of the dynasty
When Jones bought the Cowboys in 1989, the Arkansas oil wildcatter wasted no time making himself the story. He fired Tom Landry, the stoic fedora-wearing icon who had coached the team since its inception, and replaced him with University of Miami wunderkind Jimmy Johnson. Together they pulled off the Herschel Walker trade: flipping their best player to Minnesota for a haul of draft picks that would become Emmitt Smith, Darren Woodson, Russell Maryland and other franchise cornerstones.
Those Cowboys were an irresistible blend of talent and swagger. Quarterback Troy Aikman was a surgeon in shoulder pads, Smith the metronomic back pounding out yards with mechanical certainty with wideout Michael Irvin turning every catch into a street fight. From 1992 to 1995, they won three Super Bowls in four years, a volume of dominance unseen since Lombardi’s Packers.
But even amid the confetti, there were cracks. Jones wanted his props not just as an owner but as a football architect. Johnson, who was doing much of the actual roster-building, bristled at the limelight-chasing owner elbowing in on the credit. After the 1993 season, Jones said that 500 coaches could have won with those players. Less than a year later, Johnson was gone.
Smith’s contract squabble that same year also offered an early glimpse of Jones’s approach to standoffs with stars. Coming off consecutive rushing titles, Smith sat out the first two games of the 1993 season while seeking a new deal. The Cowboys lost both of them before Jones caved, signing Smith to what was then the richest running back contract in league history. Smith returned, was named the NFL’s Most Valuable Player that year and powered Dallas to two more Super Bowl titles. Jones has since pointed to that episode, and later holdouts by Zack Martin, CeeDee Lamb and Dak Prescott, as proof he can outwait any player at the bargaining table. The difference in 2025 is that his hard line with Parsons didn’t end with deescalation and resolution, but a trade that shipped the team’s best player to Green Bay.
Mike Tirico, the veteran commentator who will call Thursday’s season opener in Philadelphia for NBC, was in his first year covering the NFL as a host or play-by-play man when Smith’s saga unfolded. “It was 32 years ago we did the first NFL Monday night pregame show on ESPN, and that was the Emmitt Smith holdout season,” Tirico said last week. “The Cowboys opened that season on Monday night, got blown out, lost the second game, and then Emmitt came back, and they were the first 0-2 starter to go win a Super Bowl. We’ve been down this road before [with Dallas]. But with Micah, it just feels like it has reached an even different level – with some direct animosity here.”
Barry Switzer, Johnson’s old college rival, took over and immediately benefited from the roster he inherited. Dallas won again in 1995. It would be their last. The exit of Johnson wasn’t just the end of a partnership; it was the beginning of a demolition of a structure in which football decisions were made without Jones’s hand on every lever. The dynasty had been built on clear roles; from here on, it would run on Jerry’s terms.
Cris Collinsworth, who will join Tirico in the booth on Thursday, reflected on the shift: “You look back on this team and where they were after winning those two Super Bowls, and obviously, the whole Jimmy and Jerry thing has been discussed for a long, long time. But it was really a unique opportunity for a lot of young talent, including young ownership, including a young head coach that could have gone on for a long, long time after that. They’ve been so close since – Parcells had them a fumbled snap away – but it doesn’t feel like they’ve ever quite recaptured the raw emotion of those early 90s teams.”
Which is why the Parsons trade landed with such bitter irony. In 1989, Jones had traded a superstar and built a dynasty. In 2025, he traded a superstar and convinced no one that another was coming.
From contenders to content mill
The years after the last Super Bowl were messy on and off the field. The roster aged, the depth evaporated and the headlines got louder. In 1996, Irvin was arrested for cocaine possession in a hotel room with “two self-employed models”, a case that produced more tabloid column-inches than touchdowns. Switzer resigned a year later after being caught with a loaded .38-caliber revolver at an airport and overseeing a dismal 1997 campaign.
Jones’s coaching hires shrank in stature. Chan Gailey, the former Steelers offensive coordinator, made the playoffs twice but left after two seasons. His most famous moment might be his reluctance to draft Randy Moss in 1998, a decision that haunted Dallas for years.
Next came Dave Campo, a likeable defensive coordinator who had never been a head coach. Under him, the Cowboys went 5-11 three straight seasons, cycled through Quincy Carter, Chad Hutchinson and Ryan Leaf at quarterback, and traded two first-round picks for receiver Joey Galloway – a costly deal that helped push Deion Sanders out the door.
By the early 2000s, Dallas were stuck in an identity crisis. They still called themselves America’s Team, but the on-field product was unremarkable. What did sell, however, were stories: the chaos of the late-90s locker room, the nostalgia for past stars and Jones’s constant presence in front of a microphone. The Cowboys were drifting toward the “365 days a year” model before he’d ever put it in those words.
The arrival of Bill Parcells in 2003 briefly changed the tone. Parcells, a Hall of Famer, reintroduced discipline – rookies had to “earn the star” on their helmets – and constructed a top-10 defense. But quarterback instability hobbled the project. Carter was dismissed after failing multiple drug tests, quadragenarian Vinny Testaverde had a stopgap year under center, and a faded Drew Bledsoe couldn’t stop the slide.
Then came Tony Romo. An undrafted free agent from Eastern Illinois, Romo seized the job in 2006 and immediately became one of the NFL’s most exciting quarterbacks. But his defining moment came that same season in a wildcard playoff game at Seattle: serving as the holder on a short field goal to win the game, he fumbled the snap and was tackled just shy of the goalline. The fiasco was replayed endlessly. It was the kind of viral heartbreak that keeps a team in the national conversation long after the final whistle – exactly the kind of drama Jones celebrates.
Jones doubled down by signing Terrell Owens, the league’s most combustible star fresh off a messy divorce with archrivals Philadelphia, in 2006. It made for gripping TV – sideline blow-ups, misty-eyed press scrums – but not sustained playoff success. A 13-3 season in 2007 ended with a home loss to the New York Giants, who went on to win the Super Bowl. In 2008, the regular season came down to a single game in Philadelphia where the winner advanced to the playoffs and the loser went home. The Eagles didn’t just win; they obliterated Dallas 44-6, a stomping so memorable in Philly that it was scripted into the climax of Silver Linings Playbook.
All of it was the kind of humiliation that, in the Cowboys’ universe, doubled as a content bonanza: shame on the scoreboard, saturation on the airwaves.
By 2009, Jones had given his worldview physical form. AT&T Stadium – instantly christened Jerry World – opened in Arlington as the largest, most expensive football venue on earth, crowned by twin video boards the size of city blocks. A $1.3bn monument to the belief that sizzle matters as much as silverware, it was able to attract a Super Bowl, wrangle major prizefights away from Las Vegas, and even came within a hair of landing the 2026 World Cup final. The Cowboys have yet to reach a conference championship under its retractable roof, but that’s almost beside the point. With 100,000 fans crammed in and replays flashing in Imax scale, the building itself became the attraction: another reminder that for Jones, the spectacle has always been the product.
But over the next decade, Manny Pacquiao won more fights in Jones’s personal coliseum than Dallas won playoff games. Jason Garrett took over midway through 2010, and the Cowboys entered a stretch of football purgatory: 8-8 in 2011, 2012 and 2013, each year losing a de facto playoff game in Week 17. They had talent – Dez Bryant was emerging as one of the league’s best receivers – but the defense lagged behind, and the January glory never arrived.
The McCarthy era and the Netflix truth
In 2014, everything seemed to align. The offensive line was the league’s best, DeMarco Murray led the NFL in rushing, while the defense climbed into the middle of the pack. Dallas went 12-4, won a playoff game over Detroit and had a shot in Green Bay. On fourth down late in the game, Bryant made a spectacular leaping grab inside the Packers’ five-yard line – or so it seemed. After review, officials ruled it incomplete. “Dez caught it” became a rallying cry, a grievance, and another off-season content cycle.
Injuries wrecked 2015, but in 2016 Romo’s back injury cleared the way for rookie Dak Prescott. Alongside fellow rookie Ezekiel Elliott, Prescott led Dallas to a 13-3 record and the NFC’s No 1 seed. Once again, it ended at home to Aaron Rodgers and the underdog Packers, on a pinpoint sideline throw that set up a game-winning field goal.
Garrett’s teams remained competitive but couldn’t cross the divisional-round barrier. In 2019, they outscored opponents by 113 points yet missed the playoffs entirely, a statistical anomaly tailor-made for sports radio fodder.
Mike McCarthy replaced Garrett in 2020, bringing a Super Bowl ring from Green Bay and, briefly, an offensive renaissance. From 2021 to 2023, Dallas won 12 games each year, ranked among the league’s best defenses and saw Prescott post career numbers. But the endings were familiar: a botched quarterback draw with no time left against San Francisco, another playoff loss to the 49ers, and finally a 48-32 home humiliation by Jordan Love’s Packers.
Through it all, Jones never stopped feeding the content machine. Every draft pick, every coaching rumor, every sideline shot was part of the reality show. This year, he hired Brian Schottenheimer after a conspicuously long search, a first-time head coach whose main qualification seemed to be keeping Jones’s power intact.
Collinsworth, now in his 17th year as NBC’s analyst, sees a familiar ceiling: “I think about Mike McCarthy. Out of the five years, Dak Prescott has played three of them, and they won 12 games all three times. Dak was second in MVP balloting just a couple of years ago. If he’s right physically, if George Pickens offsets a little for CeeDee Lamb, and if that rebuilt offensive line with three No 1 draft choices can stay healthy, there’s an upside. But defensively, with the injuries and now without Micah, they’ll have to outscore people. The pressure is on the offense to carry this team.”
The Jones ceiling
The drought in north Texas is no ordinary dry spell. The NFL is designed to pull everyone back toward the middle: the draft steers the best prospects to the worst teams, the schedule softens for those who struggle, the hard salary cap is built to prevent runaway dynasties and a system of revenue sharing fills everybody’s coffers. It’s baked into league’s business model: a kind of gridiron socialism meant to guarantee every city a turn at hope, keeping fans engaged, loyal and spending. In a system where even basket-case franchises usually cycle back into contention within a decade, the Cowboys’ 30-year exile from the NFC title game is less a slump than a defiance of elemental forces.
The Cowboys’ problems go beyond the schematic. Former NFL guard Uche Nwaneri, who had a brief stint in Dallas, described a “circus environment” inside the facility: slogans about prestige on every wall, players treated as if they were defending champions in “an alternate universe”, even as the rest of the league saw a team with one playoff win in a decade.
The Parsons debacle followed a familiar script: Jones overestimating his leverage, dragging out negotiations and miscalculating the market. He’d played the brinksmanship game before – with Elliott, Lamb, Prescott and others – only this time, the player walked.
Jones even bragged to Irvin on a podcast that Parsons’s agent had told him to “stick it up [his] ass.” He insisted fans should “not lose any sleep” over a trade request. But in the end, it was Jones who flinched, sending away the Cowboys’ best player at the worst possible time. The hard, cold truth: for all the Netflix myth-making and “365 days a year” tabloid fodder, the Cowboys went to bed last Thursday farther from ending their 30-year Super Bowl drought than when they woke up.
And yet, for all the stagnation, the Cowboys remain the NFL’s biggest draw. The America’s Team nickname, coined in 1978, has survived slumps, scandals and serial underachievement. The Thanksgiving tradition, the colossal screens at AT&T Stadium, the cheerleaders (a franchise in their own right), the coast-to-coast fan base – all of it feeds into the brand.
Are they still America’s Team? Perhaps now more than ever. They’ve become the emblem of a fading empire, equal parts spectacle and self-delusion, the clearest distillation of US sports culture: a league where the scoreboard matters less than the stagecraft, where Forbes valuations are bandied about unironically like championships, and where myth endures even when the trophy case gathers dust. The Cowboys are living proof that in American sport, myth can subsume commerce and culture can overwhelm competition. The dumbest timeline, rendered in silver and blue.
Jones is both the architect and the ceiling of the Cowboys. His early gamble on Johnson produced a dynasty; his refusal to relinquish control has produced nearly three decades of almosts. The Parsons trade sharpened the paradox. It wasn’t a master class in negotiation but a reminder of Jones’s worldview: that being Jerry, and being the Cowboys, ought to be enough. For 30 years it hasn’t been.
And as Thursday night will remind everyone, one of Dallas’s greatest rivals is now the one raising banners. For Eagles fans, it’s schadenfreude beyond a city’s wildest dreams; for Cowboys fans, it’s torment. For Jones, it’s another night in the spotlight, win or lose. The soap opera goes on. The sizzle remains. The silverware, not so much.
