👋 Good morning! Football is footballing, Jerry is Jerrying, and a disgruntled Cowboys star is retweeting some cryptic stuff. In other words, the season is here. Let’s not waste time today. — Bobby Karalla

At yesterday’s annual camp-opening press conference, Dallas Cowboys owner and GM Jerry Jones said once again that he had a deal in place with Micah Parsons (and/or Michael Parson). “We went over every possible detail that you can go over,” Jones said, according to our Clarence Hill who’s there in Oxnard.

So then… what happened?

Parsons told Jones to call his agent, David Mulugheta, who keeps negotiating better and better deals for his clients. Jones, meanwhile, earlier this year publicly claimed he didn’t know Mulugheta’s name. He very likely did not make that call and has yet to make that call.

Jones always, always, always pays his stars. He usually waits too long to do it, so he and the Cowboys almost always “lose” those deals, but at the end of the day the player is in uniform so all is right with the world. That player might also miss all of training camp, but that’s just the way business goes sometimes.

Jones is going to pay Parsons. Parsons will be the highest-paid defensive player of all-time. It’s gonna end up working out. Parsons, despite retweeting JJ Watt observations and taking a public stand about this whole fiasco, will smile with the pen in hand and the IG post will get 132,000 likes.

We’ve seen this same exact situation play out year after year for what feels like an eternity at this point. It doesn’t have to be that way, and in fact it really shouldn’t ever be that way, but our opinions don’t matter to Jones. He said so himself yesterday. He believes he’s doing the best thing he can for his football team to help them win games and win trophies. That’s all that matters to him, he says. His football team and winning. That’s it.

Fair enough. I just hope he and Michael get a deal done soon. It’s gonna be tough for the Cowboys to win without him, as Jerry knows.

Yesterday was a tough one for new Mavericks guard D’Angelo Russell. I’m not gonna talk about what was going around on Twitter last night — that’s up to you to investigate. No, I’m talking about the discussion we had with former Mavs VP of Content Mike Marshall, who joined Tim Cato and me on the DLLS Mavs podcast to talk about the upcoming season, the season that was, and some wonderful Dirk memories from his final season.

I worked with Machine for six years and have known him much longer, and we see the game pretty similarly. I knew he’d be low on the DLo signing, at least within the context of him needing to be the starting point guard for most — if not all — of the season. I feel like it’s kind of an implied thing at this point, but it’s important to reiterate that, on paper, the Mavs do have a very deep, very talented team. But Kyrie Irving might miss half the season, three-quarters of it, or even the whole thing. That’s a huge blow, considering no other team in the West is currently staring down a long absence from its best or second-best player. Injuries will inevitably and unfortunately strike other teams’ stars at some point, but until then the Mavs will be missing the most talent of any team in the daunting Western Conference. That’s not a distinction you ever want your team to own.

Sam Nestler has a nice roundup of Stars news and notes from the weekend here, including critiques of the players’ artwork for their schedule release. It’s wonderful.

Klay Thompson rules.

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