Don’t let the Micah Parsons blockbuster trade distract you from one of the most pressing league issues from his final days in Dallas
Micah Parsons’ extension amid a trade to the Packers wiped away his 2025 financial worries but future pass rushers should stay leery of this CBA loophole.
Don’t let Micah Parsons‘ blockbuster trade from the Dallas Cowboys to the Green Bay Packers distract you from one of the more pressing subplots of the Jerry Jones/Parsons feud. Just hours before Parsons was dealt to Green Bay, the news broke that Parsons had filed a grievance to the NFL regarding his fifth-year option price, as dictated by the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement with the NFL Player’s Association.
The CBA was getting a new chance to showcase some cracks in the system. When the NFL set up the rookie wage scale to help get rookie contract costs under control nearly two decades ago, they set up a system that bucketed player pay for a fifth-year of fully guaranteed salary for rookies draft in the first round of their respective NFL Drafts. There’s just one problem with that system, which Parsons found himself at odds with as he prepped for the year ahead.
Parsons was classified as a defensive end for his option price — but many of the league’s best pass rushers are classified as linebackers these days. When the fifth-year option structure and the qualifying positions were first instilled in 2011 upon the implementation of a new CBA, football was different on both sides of the ball back then. Defensive fronts have become much more fluid and much more diverse. As a result, the lines of what classifies as the two positions that Parsons was being weighed as a candidate for, ‘defensive end’ and ‘linebacker’, are more blurry than they’ve ever been.
It was just five years ago that Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker Bud Dupree was franchise tagged and filed a grievance as an “outside linebacker” to be classified as a defensive end. Why? Because the pay was higher. Now, five years later, Parsons filed a grievance to be classified as a linebacker instead — because many of the same “outside linebackers” that proactively got deals done to boost the salary rates of each position group over these last five years are indeed edge rushers who rush the passer and have done so under the title of “linebacker”. As a result, the franchise tag and fifth-year option rates for linebackers are now higher than that of defensive ends.
The CBA allots all of these tag and option price points to be weighted across a five-year average of salaries at their respective positions. Bud Dupree’s 2020 franchise tag dispute was weighing defensive end and linebacker contract values as far back as 2015, when Robert Quinn was the only “linebacker” who didn’t play off the ball among the top-10 salaries at the position. By 2024, the most recent year impacting Micah Parsons, you see Bradley Chubb, Brian Burns, Harold Landry, Bryce Huff, Uchenna Nwosu, and Haason Reddick are all listed as “linebackers” on Spotrac — more than half of the top-10 “linebacker” salaries are indeed primary pass rushers.
This is unnecessarily complicated. The next iteration of the NFL and NFLPA collective bargaining agreement would do well to further and better define the positional divide between stack linebackers and rush linebackers — there’s no reason to use verbiage that was most prevalent when the designation between a 4-3 and a 3-4 front was still carrying significant weight. Every NFL front is multiple these days and, as such, your pass rushers should be recognized as pass rushers, no matter whether they’re releasing from a two or three-point stance.
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