👋 Happy Wednesday! Another day, another reason why it’s actually Micah Parsons and Trevon Diggs who are wrong, not the Dallas Cowboys. Shame on you for not believing that already, silly sports fans! We’ll explain more below. — Bobby Karalla

Dallas Cowboys vice president Stephen Jones is here to tell you why the Cowboys’ good players aren’t making as much money as they should, and why the Cowboys are correct in doing so.

He gave an interview Tuesday on 105.3 The Fan, first discussing Trevon Diggs’ recovery and the controversy surrounding the team’s decision to dock $500K from this season’s salary for not attending at least 84 percent of the team’s offseason activities.

“One thing we can do, which we will continue to do is put in every player’s contract, especially guys that we pay significant amounts of money, we expect leadership and we expect them to be here,” Jones said. “Certainly we addressed that with Diggs.”

I cover basketball, so maybe this is a pretty common clause or stipulation to have in player contracts, but that just seems really weird. It’s like docking a kid 10 points on their homework because they didn’t put the date on the top-right of the page. I’m not here to tell you Trevon Diggs is invaluable to the program or the leader (or not the leader) in the room, but it just doesn’t really make any sense to me that this would be a thing a team does, and a thing a player agrees to in his deal.

I also really don’t like the way Jones is talking about this.

“He certainly paid a price for not being here,” he said. Maybe I’m reading way too far into this, but it feels very flippant and condescending. The context certainly isn’t doing Jones any favors here, as his team is very famously not in negotiations with the most powerful agent in the sport, who represents one of the best players on Jones’s team. The Cowboys GM publicly claimed to not know the agent’s name, and on opening day of camp referred to the player as “Michael Parson.” The Jones family is in no position to talk about the players as if the Joneses are adults and the players are children.

Speaking of Micah Parsons, who’s going through the same thing CeeDee Lamb went through last offseason and practically every other good player the Cowboys have ever had in the last 20 years or so has also gone through, note-for-note and bar-for-bar, Jones said he doesn’t see any similarities.

“I don’t think there is a pattern here,” Jones said. “We don’t drag deals out. We do deals when there’s an opportunity to do a deal.”

The “opportunity” he’s referring to is the chance to make the player the highest-paid at his position in the league.

“What we’re not going to do is go out and do something that’s not responsible in terms of just getting a deal done one month earlier and pay the guy another $5 million of your cap space,” he said, despite knowing full well that Parsons will be the highest-paid defensive player in NFL history the moment he inevitably signs his deal in a week or two. “Especially when you’re dealing, in our particular case, internally with guys who are homegrown here and we feel like they want to be here. I felt like Dak wanted to be here. I always felt like CeeDee wanted to be here.”

The Joneses aren’t winning this negotiation. Cowboys fans scream at them to pay Micah. Everyone in the world knows they’re going to. In the meantime they’re just trying to score imaginary points against his agent (ol’ what’s-his-name?) and taking money from Trevon Diggs, all while claiming they’re keeping the main thing the main thing.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Cowboys training camp! We’ll run this same article next summer, only it’ll be about Tyler Smith instead.

Jeff Wilson has an excellent breakdown of possible Rangers trade targets in opposing bullpens ahead of tomorrow’s deadline. Texas is apparently pretty aggressively looking for upgrades. Let’s see if Chris Young can pull it off.

The DLLS Stars crew took a look at how Glen Gulutzan might coach his new team on yesterday’s show. Check it out!

The Rangers lost last night’s game, but this was an absolute gem.

Be sure to subscribe to our shows wherever you listen to your podcasts. Traffic can be the worst, and one of the best ways I get through it is by listening to the audio versions of our DLLS shows. You should, too!

Bobby Karalla
DLLS Sports Head of Content​
[email protected]