Micah Parsons no longer wants to be a Cowboy.
The star edge rusher edge has requested a trade out of Dallas, after no recent movement in contract talks.
A four-time Pro Bowler, 26-year-old Parsons is in the final year of his rookie contract, and has been long overdue a big-money extension.
A strong of teams would likely be ready to hand over a huge bounty to land the defense superstar – but it seems Jerry Jones is not ready to hand him his contract.
The Cowboys owner, who is worth $17bn, recently made flippant remarks about his star player’s injury history in a press conference.
In his own statement, Parsons suggested those ‘shots’ contributed to his trade demand, and there is now a serious chance he departs Dallas.
But he is certainly not the first star player to fall out with Jones.
Jerry might be dragging his feet with Parsons, but he has also done the same with franchise quarterback Dak Prescott, running back Ezekiel Elliott, and wideout CeeDee Lamb in recent years.
All of those players eventually committed to the franchise, but long before those contentious negotiations, Jones had an infamous dispute with Emmitt Smith.
1990s Cowboys dynasty nearly derailed by contract chaos
Back in the summer of 1993, the Cowboys were on the verge of establishing a dominating dynasty.
Under head coach Jimmy Johnson, America’s Team secured a 52-17 win over the Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl XXVII, with quarterback Troy Aikman throwing four touchdowns en-route to the MVP award.
Smith was also untouchable at running back, and added a Super Bowl TD to his franchise record — and league leading — 1,713 regular-season rushing yards.
Wide receiver Michael Irvin, tight end Jay Novacek and offensive linemen Nate Newton and Mark Stepnoski were also named to the Pro Bowl for the 1992 season in which the team went 13-3.
So when the Cowboys arrived for training camp a few months later, they were expected to pick up exactly where they left off.
But Smith was nowhere to be found.
Smith’s memorable Cowboys ‘holdout’
For all his work in the 1992 season, the running back only made $465,000.
The popularly-held version of Smith’s infamous story is that he was holding out for a bigger paycheck from the Dallas front office that summer.
Owner Jones, though, wouldn’t budge — and the star missed all of training camp. He was also absent from the first two regular season games in 1993.
With rookie Derrick Lassic running in Smith’s place, the Cowboys lost both of those contests, and the front office finally caved.
Dallas made their star the highest-paid RB in the league, with a four-year, $13.6million contract.
It was money well spent, as Smith helped the Cowboys turn their season around.
He led the NFL in rushing again on the way to winning the regular-season and Super Bowl MVPs, as Dallas secured their second-straight championship.
All these years later, and Smith is remembered as the man who made the Cowboys blink first.
But he has since shared his side of the story, insisting he wasn’t ‘holding out’ on the team.
“Holding out is when you have a contract, and you want more money,” he told The Pivot Podcast two years ago.
“My contract was over. I had fulfilled my obligations.”
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Smith explained that his original four-year rookie contract had reverted to a three-year deal in his first season, so it actually expired with the Super Bowl XXVII rout.
He became a restricted free agent after that game, but remarkably didn’t receive a single offer from any other team.
Instead, he sat and watch the Cowboys open their 1993 season with his his parents in Pensacola, Florida.
He recalled: “It was killing me at home… and then my phone started ringing.”
With the Cowboys struggling, Smith got to the negotiating table, and landed a his historic contract.
“The media twisted it as if I was holding out, and people think that I held out,” he added.
“No, I was negotiating. It’s a different term than ‘holdout.’
“Holdout seems like I withheld myself and my services that were already obligated. But I had fulfilled my deal.
“I didn’t have no more to do, except for get a new contract.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
Smith won three Super Bowls in the 90s with the Cowboys, and racked up almost all of his 18,355 yards and 164 rushing TDs in his 13 seasons with Dallas.
He played for two more years with the Arizona Cardinals to cap a Hall of Fame career, which saw him enshrined into the hallowed halls of Canton in his first year of eligibility.
The record deal that Jones and the Cowboys handed Smith in 1993 was money well spent, and they would do well to remember that when it comes to a star like Parsons in the weeks to come.
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