Gimme Him: One player the Cowboys would steal from the Packers

It was just five weeks ago that media outlets were publicly claiming the Dallas Cowboys had won the Micah Parsons trade. After a contract dispute lasted the entire summer of 2025, a disgruntled Jerry Jones traded a disgruntled Micah Parsons to the Green Bay Packers in exchange for two first-round draft picks and DT Kenny Clark. Dallas parlayed the extra 2027 first and a 2026 second-round pick, sending them to the New York Jets for DT Quinnen Williams at the trade deadline.

After Williams returned to elite DT status in the back half of 2025 and with a new extension in hand to be the centerpiece of the Christian Parker’s new defense, rags started exalting the Cowboys as the winner of the big exchange. That had a lot to do with Parsons’ torn ACL, an injury from which he has still yet to retun to the field, missing the club’s Week 6 rematch. Yet still, five games into the season, Williams and Clark have been less-than-good in Parker’s scheme, and though Parsons hasn’t seen a snap, those takes of winning the trade have to be paused, if not walked back completely.

It’s even to the point that in the exercise of picking one player from the opposition to join the Cowboys, Micah Parsons is still the pick.

Gimme him.

The Cowboys could desperately use an infusion of pass-rush acumen on their team. Their sack totals are ridiuculously low on the season (five through five games) and opposing quarterbacks have over a 120 passer rating against their defense. Clean pockets are the norm, pressure is a rarity and with a suspect secondary behind them, they are a recipe for a disaster.

Parsons isn’t healthy, but adding him for the remainder of the season would at least give hpe beyond rookie Malachi Lawrence, who is in line to get more snaps moving forward. Along the way, Dallas traded for Packers edge Rashan Gary and that’s been an abject disaster. Nothing the team has tried to conjure up edge pressure has worked.

Parsons has 65 career snaps in 77 career games, and though he may not be full strength once he returns to the field, his recent words of the care he’s taking to make sure he doesn’t suffer a compensation injury are telling to his commitment to hit the field running.

He’s even said that if the Super Bowl was this weekend, he’d be on the field. Of all the things ailing the Dallas Cowboys right now, their biggest missing piece is the one they traded away under the silly guise of “improving the run defense,” which coincidentally is the worst in the league, still.

This article originally appeared on Cowboys Wire: Gimme Him: One player the Cowboys would steal from the Packers