Todd ArcherNov 3, 2025, 06:00 AM ETCloseTodd Archer is an NFL reporter at ESPN and covers the Dallas Cowboys. Archer has covered the NFL since 1997 and Dallas since 2003. He joined ESPN in 2010.Follow on X
The ‘Get Up’ crew reacts to Jerry Jones’ $100 billion comments (2:22)The “Get Up” crew reacts to Cowboys owner Jerry Jones saying he’s been busy with his natural gas business rather than fixing the team’s defense. (2:22)
Asked if there is ever a time for drastic measures — a firing, a benching, a release — Schottenheimer assured that changes would be made.
“You can’t come off a game like [the loss to the Broncos] and not expect there to be changes,” he said. “And there will be changes, I can promise you that.
Help from within is on the way with key players returning from injury. But ESPN’s Football Power Index gave Dallas (3-4-1) an 18% chance of reaching the playoffs entering Week 9, which makes Monday’s game against the Arizona Cardinals (8:15 p.m. ET, ABC/ESPN) critical.
If the Cowboys fall short of the playoffs for the second year in a row, the August trade of Micah Parsons to the Green Bay Packers will loom as a major reason. But considering how the Cowboys played with Parsons aboard last season, would that be fair?
“You know, we’re in the mode right now of we’ve got kind of a one-game season,” Schottenheimer said of Monday’s game.
He did not mean it in a win-or-else manner, noting that the Cowboys have their bye next week, which will give them a chance to take a breath before returning for “Monday Night Football” against the Las Vegas Raiders on Nov. 17.
But with a stretch of three games in 12 days coming up against the Philadelphia Eagles, Kansas City Chiefs and Detroit Lions, every game becomes more significant.
There are glaring numbers that tell a troubling story. Five of the Cowboys’ eight opponents have registered season highs in points. Opponents have scored a touchdown or a field goal on 49% of their possessions against the Cowboys, the highest rate in the NFL entering Week 9. Take out the wins against the offensively challenged New York Jets and Washington Commanders, who were without their top three receivers, and that jumps to 57%.
And while that played out, Parsons has been excelling on a Packers defense that is giving up the sixth-fewest yards (289.4) and 10th-fewest points (21.4) per game. Entering Week 9, Parsons had the best odds (+150) to win Defensive Player of the Year, per ESPN BET.
“Same with us. You’ll see a bunch of good things, and then we’ll do a bunch of bad things. I just think you’ve got to limit the bad things, and that’s an ‘everyone’ thing.”
Whether he would have leveled up the Cowboys’ defense had he stayed, and whether Dallas can find answers at the trade deadline, the team’s season sits in the shadow of the Parsons deal.
As talented as Parsons is, would he have changed the Cowboys’ narrative? Instead of being ranked 31st in points and yards per game, would Parsons’ impact have the Cowboys closer to average among NFL defenses? With Parsons playing 13 games last season, the Cowboys ranked 28th in yards and 31st in points per game.
After the 30-27 loss to the Carolina Panthers on Oct. 12, when the Cowboys allowed 216 rushing yards, Schottenheimer was asked if the defense would be any different with Parsons on the roster.
“I mean, I don’t … I don’t really know,” Schottenheimer said. “Micah’s a great player. We’ve got other great players. But it takes 11 on defense. That is the thing that, again, nine, 10 guys on a football team, offense, defense, special teams, if one of those is a little off with their assignment, a little off with their alignment, then plays happen.
Thoughts of what the defense could be with Parsons — per ESPN’s Bill Barnwell, Dallas had the best defense from 2021 to 2024 by EPA per play with Parsons on the field and the second worst without him — have not crept into the heads of players, according to the Cowboys.
“He’s a great player, definitely, but you can’t really play the ‘if’ game,” defensive tackle Osa Odighizuwa said. “That’s not something that you can ever do in life because that’s a rabbit hole that goes on forever and ever and ever and ever and ever.
There is another question that needs to be answered: Would Parsons have played at the start of the season if he were still with the Cowboys?
After his Green Bay debut, Parsons was asked if he would have played in Week 1 if he remained in Dallas.
“Man, I love football. I would’ve been playing. [Not participating in training camp] is just the hard part, the business side of it,” Parsons said. “But, nah, there’s nothing that would’ve kept me off the field. At the end of the day, this game is always bigger than us.
“I don’t think I could watch my teammates go out there without me and go to war without me knowing I should be out there. It just wouldn’t feel right for me. I’m just happy I’m with some teammates and an organization that wants me to be here and wants me to be on the field, so that’s where we’re at with that.”
Multiple sources with the Cowboys said they wonder if Parsons would have followed that path had he remained.
In the week Parsons was dealt to the Packers (for defensive tackle Kenny Clark and first-round picks in 2026 and 2027), he visited renowned back specialist Dr. Robert Watkins in Los Angeles for recurring pain that he first acknowledged during the June minicamp as a reason for not practicing. Parsons did not practice during training camp in Oxnard, California, either, ostensibly going through a hold-in, which is when a player attends practices without participating to avoid being fined.
Parsons was diagnosed with a facet joint sprain, and before the trade, the Cowboys prescribed him a five-day course of prednisone, an anti-inflammatory corticosteroid, to help him recover.
Without the offer from the Packers, the Cowboys were content to see Parsons play the season on his fifth-year option in 2025. They also made it clear they knew they could employ the franchise tag for 2026 and 2027 if the sides couldn’t come to an agreement on a new contract. The team has used that strategy before with high-profile players up to and including quarterback Dak Prescott.
Had Parsons opted to sit until he felt fully healthy, that likely would have triggered another round of issues between the player and the organization, as the Cowboys could have placed him on the non-football injury list and ultimately not paid him.
Given the fractious state of the relationship between the two sides at the time, would Parsons have been as effective as he has been with the Packers? Through seven games, Parsons — who signed a four-year, $188 million extension at the time of the trade — has 6.5 sacks, including a career-high three two weeks ago against the Cardinals.
The Cowboys have 14 sacks this season, and only one player has more than 1.5: James Houston, who joined the team in July and has 3.5.
Will Jones hold on to the draft picks from the Parsons trade and the future cap room created from the defensive end’s departure to retool things in the offseason?
“I can tell you this right now: There is not a trade in my mind — the beginning and end of one — as we sit here and talk at all,” Jones said last Tuesday on 105.3 The Fan in Dallas. “That’s not a hedge. We just don’t have one at this time that I would do.”
Sources close to the situation say the Cowboys have been actively monitoring the trade market for potentially available defensive players for several weeks. In recent years, the Cowboys have trended toward judicious trade-deadline acquisitions — younger players signed for multiple years as opposed to those on expiring contracts. Even the Cooper deal, their highest-profile deadline deal in recent memory, fit that description.
So acquiring a player such as Cincinnati defensive end Trey Hendrickson on an expiring contract would be a departure from the team’s normally deliberate trade approach.
The Cowboys never thought the defense would be this poor after the Parsons deal, but they can’t undo what has been done.
Without a big-time addition through a trade, the Cowboys will hope for improvement from within. Linebacker DeMarvion Overshown is expected to make his season debut versus the Raiders in Week 11, but he is coming back from three torn ligaments in his right knee. Rookie cornerback Shavon Revel Jr. is closer to returning, but he has had only a handful of practices since he tore the ACL in his left knee last year at East Carolina. He, too, could be activated in time for the Raiders game.
“He’s a really good player,” Schottenheimer said, “and we just want to get him back and get him healthy and be able to help us finish strong because we feel like this thing’s going to come down to the end of the season because it’s a very competitive league.”
But if the Cowboys are going to be able to finish strong, the offense will have to carry them to victory.
The defensive woes put pressure on the offense to be close to perfect. The Cowboys are second in the league offensively in yards (384.1) and points per game (30.8). The last team to average at least 30 that failed to make the playoffs was the 2004 Chiefs, according to ESPN Research. The Prescott-led unit has scored a touchdown or field goal on 43 of 86 possessions this season, virtually identical to what the opposition has done to the Cowboys’ defense.
But Schottenheimer does not concede that he needs to be more aggressive with his decision-making on fourth-down options or taking a near-automatic field goal attempt from Brandon Aubrey to cover for the shortcomings on the other side of the ball.
“I think we feel like we can go out and score anytime,” Schottenheimer said. “That’s the mindset that we take because of the talent that we have and our ability to score and strike pretty quickly and be efficient and match them. I don’t get caught up in, ‘Oh, I’ve got to call plays a certain way.’ We’ve scored 40 points multiple times. We’ve scored 30 points multiple times. It’d be great to have a couple of games maybe 10-7. Sometimes we’ll take those too.