It’s only Week 1, but we just watched the game of the year on Sunday Night Football. The Bills completed a miraculous comeback and beat the Ravens despite trailing by 15 points late in the fourth quarter. It was a matchup of two heavyweights who both could find themselves in the AFC Championship Game this year.
And if you were a Dallas Cowboys fan watching that game, it’s hard not to be demoralized considering Dallas feels light years away from those two teams. And while the Cowboys did manage to hang with the Super Bowl champs, there is a level that the Bills and Ravens went to on Sunday night that the Cowboys haven’t reached in years.
The Cowboys' idea to trade Micah Parsons makes more sense after Week 1
The Cowboys aren’t Super Bowl contenders, and they weren’t with Parsons on the team. Their projected win total this year sat at 7.5 all offseason, and no one viewed them as a top-flight team. Could they have made the postseason with Parsons? Of course, and they could still do it without him.
But it’s clear that Jerry Jones and the rest of the front office came to the realization that paying a core of Dak Prescott, CeeDee Lamb, and Micah Parsons top-tier money wasn’t going to get them over the hump. And unfortunately, because Parsons was the last one up for a deal, he was the one who got dealt.
You can make a strong case that he’s the best player of the three, but because of the timing of the other two deals, Dallas had no choice but to move on. It had nothing to do with Parsons as a player, but instead, giving them flexibility moving forward.
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We’ve seen in previous years with a healthy Parsons and Dak Prescott, that Dallas can’t match up with the top-tier teams like the Bills and Ravens. Even during some of their best seasons, they haven’t been able to get to that level. A perfect example was the 2023 performance in Buffalo, where the Bills beat the Cowboys by 21 points in a game that was never competitive. The Bills ran the Cowboys off the field, and that was with a fully healthy roster. And while we should never overreact to one game, it had become very clear that the roster was too top-heavy.
So how do the Cowboys get to that level? Outside of finding their version of Josh Allen or Lamar Jackson, they will need to do so through the draft. One thing that Baltimore and Buffalo both have is tremendous depth on both sides of the ball. That is something Dallas just doesn’t have right now, but that was part of the reason the Parsons trade was made. The hope is that with the extra draft picks combined with the additional cap savings, Dallas will be able to improve the middle of the roster.
The other issue is that they aren’t as explosive as either offense. The Cowboys should have one of the league’s better offenses this year, but both teams have much more explosive run games and it doesn’t hurt that Jackson and Allen can make plays with their legs. Prescott isn’t at that stage of his career anymore, so it’s vital that they surround him with big-time playmakers who can score from anywhere on the field.
The hope is that Lamb and Pickens can do that in 2025, but Pickens is on the last year of his contract and it remains to be seen if he is back next year. But outside of Lamb, there just aren’t many vertical playmakers in this offense and we know they don’t have a Derrick Henry or even a James Cook at running back.
It’s a shame that the Cowboys had to trade their best player in order to give them more flexibility in the future, but the Ravens-Bills contest is a perfect example of why it needed to happen. They just aren’t ready to compete with that caliber of team with or without Parsons. And it’s going to take several quality drafts and a lot of luck to get to that point.
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