With Micah Parsons, Jerry Jones Is Playing Another Contract Game He Can't Win

Micah Parsons is going to get paid a lot of money by the Dallas Cowboys, probably sooner rather than later. Jerry Jones will open his enormous vault and make the linebacker one of the highest-paid defensive players in the game.

It is inevitable. It will happen, as long as Parsons doesn’t get hurt this summer. The two men even apparently agreed to the parameters of a deal back in March.

Yet, for some reason, here we are again, in the same spot as always with the Cowboys, where Jones just can’t help but make things more difficult than they should be. Parsons is yet another star player they intend to keep and have promised to pay, waiting in limbo for a deal everyone knows he will get. Meanwhile, Jones is once again insisting there’s no "angst," no reason to panic.

Jerry Jones and Micah Parsons don't seem to be on the same page as Cowboys camp opens and the All-Pro linebacker has yet to sign an extension. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

So why, every year, does he keep welcoming that panic in?

"We’re just working with what it is," Jones told reporters as his players reported to camp in Oxnard, Calif., on Monday. "It’s not uncommon for me and not anything there’s a lot of angst over. … We are where we are. And I sign the check. Period."

Translation: Jones is the boss. The deal will be done when he says it’s done. And if the waiting doesn’t make sense to anyone else … well, that’s just too bad.

It probably makes the least sense to the 26-year-old Parsons, easily one of the five best defensive players in the NFL. The Cowboys have made it clear they plan to give him a lucrative, long-term extension. And they obviously know he’ll end up being one of the NFL’s highest-paid defensive players, which means a deal worth more