OPINION:
The part of the whole Dallas Cowboys trade of Micah Parsons to the Green Bay Packers that fascinates me the most is that the richest franchise on the planet owned by a high-profile billionaire oilman in the ninth largest city in the country traded its best player to a team whose owners can be found throughout the local phone book in a city that isn’t even ranked in the top 100 in the United States.
That elite pass rusher Micah Parsons is now a Green Bay Packer with a $188 million contract is a miracle of sports that can only happen in the National Football League.
It’s like the New York Yankees trading Aaron Judge to the Toledo Mud Hens.
I will always remain fixated on the existence of the Packers — a museum exhibit under any other circumstances except the NFL. Green Bay was one of the early franchises in the league more than 100 years ago, when much of the league consisted of teams in small midwestern towns like Akron, Dayton, Rock Island and other communities — like Green Bay.
It has not only survived, but thrived, because there is not a Jerry Jones or Dan Snyder in charge. The Packers are a nonprofit community-owned franchise, with stockholders and a board of directors to answer to.
This has not stopped them from being one of the most successful franchises in the league, both on the field and inside the business offices – 13 NFL championships and a revenue stream that went over $700 million last year.
The irony is they are worth half of what the Cowboys value is, according to Forbes’ most recent estimates.
Green Bay is worth $6.6 billion, compared to $13 billion for Dallas — and that is because of Jones, who bought the Cowboys for $140 million in 1989 and turned it into a marketing juggernaut.
If you want to learn more about how this happened, there is an eight-part documentary on Netflix now called “America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys” about Jones and the drama of his ownership of the franchise.
Add that to the library of Cowboys programming, like the reality television show that is going on 16 years — “Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team.”
A show about the Green Bay Packers? I remember Green Acres.
There have been documentaries, particularly about their legendary coach, the great Vince Lombardi. But the franchise has not created the sort of drama (save for the recent documentary about former quarterback Brett Favre) that has helped make Jones a super-rich man — and more importantly, fed his massive ego, which continues to wreck the football operation — like the circumstances that led to the ridiculous trade of Parsons, a four-time Pro Bowl linebacker selection.
Parsons was in the final year of his Dallas contract and sought a record-breaking contract extension. The 82-year-old Jones decided he was bigger than the NFL Players Association protocol of negotiating with certified agents for players’ contracts and went directly to Parsons with the Cowboys offer, which the agent reportedly told the Dallas owner to stick it under his 10-gallon hat.
Things got progressively worse publicly and privately until the damage was beyond repair. Dallas then made the trade to Green Bay in return for two first-round picks over the next two years and Pro Bowl defensive tackle Kenny Clark.
Parsons is a generational talent. The two draft choices Dallas got will likely be low first-round picks, since there is a good chance Green Bay will finish with double-digit wins over the next two seasons. This was not, despite Jones’ face-saving declaration attempts, a repeat of the Herschel Walker trade that helped the Jimmy Johnson Cowboys win two Super Bowls and then a third under Barry Switzer after Jones fired Johnson in yet another ego spell. He hasn’t learned much in 36 years of ownership.
Cowboys fans would probably love it if their franchise had a Green Bay-type structure, with community ownership committed to a football product that generated revenue and not WWE-style reality programming. But the NFL passed an amendment in 1960 to their constitution, known as the “Green Bay Rule,” which prohibits such community ownership structure. The Packers were grandfathered in.
One year later, the league, through the federal Sports Broadcasting Act, gave Green Bay the life preserver it needed to survive by agreeing to share television revenue equally among all the clubs.
Because of that, the Packers and the Cowboys both received the same amount of national television revenue last year — $432.6 million.
They use it in Green Bay to play football. They use it in Dallas to glorify their owner.
• Catch Thom Loverro on “The Kevin Sheehan Show” podcast.
