Jabari Young asked me a simple question in the middle of our conversation: if you're Micah Parsons, sitting in Oxnard in August heat, still under contract, still not paid what you think you're worth — do you hold out?
My answer was no.
Not because I don't understand the frustration. Not because I think Jerry Jones is handling it well. But because I've been through this, and the thing I learned — the hard way, the Detroit way — is that the holdout is the visible move, and visible moves almost never win contract negotiations. What wins contract negotiations is leverage. And leverage in the NFL has a specific address: free agency. The holdout is just noise you make on the way there.
The holdout isn't the threat. The empty roster spot is.
Here's what actually happens when a player holds out in training camp. The team loses a few practice reps. The coaches get asked about it in press conferences. The ESPN scroll updates. That's it.
What doesn't happen: the team panics. The team folds. The team comes back with a number that reflects the player's actual market value. That sequence almost never completes during a holdout because the team still controls the player's rights. They know he has nowhere else to go. The holdout is a tantrum inside a locked room — you can make noise, but you can't leave.
The leverage flips at free agency. That's when the room unlocks. That's when the Cowboys have to watch Micah Parsons take a meeting with a different organization and sign for a number that makes what Jerry offered look like a bad joke. That's the moment that creates real urgency.
I watched this play out with myself in Detroit. I played through my contract, I performed, and when free agency came, Miami offered a number Detroit didn't want to match. And the strangest part — they could have matched it, even knowing I'd lose money on the deal from a tax perspective playing in Florida. They still didn't. At that point it stopped being about money and started being about ego. But I had already won. I had already broken history. The leverage was real because I had somewhere real to go.
The holdout in preseason is theater. Free agency is the actual negotiation.
What "showing up anyway" actually signals
There's a version of showing up to camp while holding out that most people misread. Micah Parsons is in Oxnard. He's not practicing. His toe hurts. His back is tight. He's in meetings, he's present, but he's not on the field. And everyone says he's holding out.
What he's actually doing — if he's smart about it — is managing two things at once. He's avoiding the fines that compound into conduct detrimental, which can void a contract and create problems that are genuinely bad for both sides. And he's maintaining the posture of a professional while still withholding what the team actually wants from him, which is his body on that football field.
The new holdout is not the old holdout. The old holdout was Deion Sanders not showing up to camp at all, missing weeks, daring the team to fine him into submission. The new version is more surgical. You show up. You're present. You're just — not quite available. My back, man. I don't feel right today. That's a psychology game, and teams know it, and players know teams know it, and still — it works, because the alternative for the team is to escalate publicly over a player who hasn't technically done anything wrong. Most front offices don't want that story.
The fines are part of the calculation, not the end of it. The team can choose to waive them. Both sides know they can be traded away in a new deal for something else. When Trey Hendricks came back to the Bengals after his holdout, you can be certain some of those fines were part of what got negotiated away before he walked through the door. That's how the psychology works. The fine structure is a tool, not a verdict.
PULL QUOTE: "The money makes me comfortable to be out there uncomfortable." — Ndamukong Suh
The paragraph five nobody reads
Jabari asked me what goes on inside contract negotiations that people don't talk about. The answer is: almost everything that matters.
The number that gets reported on the ESPN scroll — the total value, the average per year, the guaranteed money — is not the contract. It's the marketing summary of the contract. The actual contract is in the paragraphs nobody quotes, and the most important of those for me was always paragraph five, which is your weekly salary during the season.
I wanted that number to be as low as possible.
That sounds backwards until you understand why. The money I cared about came in at signing — bonus, roster bonus, guaranteed cash up front. P-5 was the trickle. Keeping P-5 small and loading up the front-end money meant I had cash in hand when I was healthy, when I was playing, when my value was at its peak. It also meant I had leverage in future negotiations because the cash I'd already received wasn't sitting on the cap in a way that constrained how teams structured extensions.
This is cash over cap, and it's one of those concepts that sounds technical until you realize it's the difference between being paid what you're worth and being paid what the team's cap situation can accommodate. The two numbers are usually not the same. Understanding how to close that gap — not through holdouts, but through contract architecture — is what separates players who leave the league wealthy from players who leave it having played for less than they were worth for four straight years.
I learned this by sitting with my agents early in my career and actually reading the contracts. Not having them summarized. Not getting the highlight reel version. Reading the language. By the time I was negotiating on my own, I knew what I was looking at, and that knowledge saved me real money — the agent fees alone were 2, 3% of a very large contract. But more than that, it gave me the ability to say no to structures I understood were bad for me, instead of deferring to someone I hoped had my interests at the top of their list.
NIL changes the game in a direction nobody's fully tracked yet
The piece of this conversation I keep thinking about: Jabari made the point that NIL money is going to change how rookie holdouts look, and I think he's right, but not quite for the reasons most people say.
The common version of the argument is that college players who were making $1.5 million in NIL deals are going to reach the NFL, see league minimum around $750K, do the after-tax math, and decide the NFL isn't the step up they thought it was. That's true. But the deeper thing is what NIL is doing to the relationship between players and money over time.
A player who's been getting paid in college — real money, with real agents and real advisors and real brand deals — arrives in the NFL with a fundamentally different financial vocabulary than the player who got a scholarship and a per diem. He's already seen tax bills. He's already had to decide whether to take an NIL deal from one brand or another based on what it does to his image. He understands, at least partially, what a guaranteed deal means versus a performance-based one. That player is going to be much harder to low-ball.
And he's also going to be more willing to wait. If you've been paid well since your sophomore year of college, a rookie contract holdout fine doesn't carry the same psychological weight. You have a financial foundation under you. You can absorb it. That changes the negotiating dynamic in a way that I don't think team front offices have fully priced in yet.
The next wave of holdouts is going to be more patient, more informed, and more expensive.
What I'd tell a player coming in right now
Three things, in order of what I wish I had known earliest:
- Read your contract before you sign it — not the summary, the contract. I cannot say this enough. The number they put in the press release is not the contract. The contract is what protects you when you're hurt, what defines what "guarantee" actually means in your specific deal, what determines whether your signing bonus gets clawed back if you're cut under certain conditions. There are lawyers at the NFLPA specifically available to help you understand this. Go use them. Whatever you pay in legal fees to understand what you're signing is a fraction of what you'll lose if you sign something you didn't understand.
- Know your market before you walk into the room. I went through every comparable deal at my position before any negotiation. Mario Williams. J.J. Watt. Everyone. Not to copy their numbers but to understand the market range and where I sat in it — based on production, availability, accolades, not based on what a team told me I was worth. The team will always quote you the floor of your market range. You need to already know what the ceiling looks like before the first meeting.
- The free agency leverage is only real if you've performed. This is the part that sounds obvious but isn't. Everything I've said about waiting for free agency, about letting the market speak, about breaking history — none of it works if you don't play well. The holdout in preseason that isn't backed up by production on the field is a bluff. Jerry Jones knows what Micah Parsons has done. The reason Parsons has real leverage is that his tape is undeniable. The path I'd take if I were him: show up, play this year better than last year, and let the market set a number that makes whatever Dallas was offering look small. Then you don't have to ask for anything. The market just tells them.
I told Jabari at the end of the conversation: if I'm Micah Parsons, I'm putting the feet to the fire. Playing out the deal. Balling out this year.
And then Jerry's paying more than he would've, whether he wanted to or not.
That's how it works. The holdout gets the headlines. The performance gets the money.