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There’s been plenty of blame tossed around for the state the Cowboys currently find themselves in. For the playoff beatdown at the hands of the Packers that still stings. For the radio silence the front office maintained during free agency, when other teams were signing veteran players to improve their rosters. For the lack of movement in getting new deals done with their biggest superstars, leading to questions about the long-term vision for the club. For trotting out the entire coaching staff on one-year contracts, cranking the hot seats all the way to high with months still to go before the season opener.
Yes, lots of fingers pointed in every which direction.
But now they’re being pointed inside the locker room.
Cowboys safety Malik Hooker had some thoughts when he was asked recently about players- like, specifically, Hooker’s defensive teammate Micah Parsons- spending so much time and energy during the season cultivating their personal brands off the field through platforms like podcasts.
“My advice for Micah would be: just know we’re all right and being where your feet are,” he said, ironically, on an episode of Keyshawn Johnson’s All Facts No Brakes podcast. “Because if were at work, and the run game’s terrible, but you’re doing a podcast every week and you know the run game is terrible, then what are you really caring about? Are you caring about the crowd that ‘s watching your podcast? Or caring about the success of our team and the Super Bowl that we’re trying to reach?”
Malik Hooker is absolutely right.
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— STEPH (@BlitzDallas) June 28, 2024
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“I ain’t trying to get you in trouble,” Johnson had nonchalantly prefaced his question, knowing full well that almost anything Hooker said would cause a stir.
Hooker’s answer definitely touched off a firestorm. And it started with Parsons personally posting a reply to his teammate.
In a since-deleted post on X, Parsons wrote:
“Just wish you said this to me but instead on some podcast! And you got my number family! @MalikHooker24 and you my locker mate! So you coulda said this any day! And you do realize I shoot the podcast on our off day! I why [sic] ain’t we talking about everyone preparations and focus leading up to the game week? I mean I can point out a lot of other things but I’m just not!”
Hooker’s larger point is a valid one, a sentiment shared and voiced by plenty of fans, analysts, observers, and even many close to today’s game. The optics are often not good when a player of Parsons’s stature is so visibly involved in creating a brand away from the gridiron, no matter how locked in he is during practice, in team meetings, and on gameday.
When your job is to win football games, devoting any energy at all to a show-business side hustle will invariably rub some the wrong way, especially after a high-profile loss.
But Parsons isn’t wrong, either. Recording his podcast on the team’s off day really isn’t detracting from his defensive preparation. And if Hooker had an issue with it, one would hope that conversation might have more appropriately come up in a private setting, or that he at least would not have called out a teammate by name on someone else’s show.
“But also, people got to remember Micah’s young,” Hooker continued, in the rest of his answer that will get far less airplay than the original shot across the bow. “He’s still trying to find his way, he’s still trying to grow into who he’s trying to be. So I give him grace.”
“Micah’s still a big kid,” Hooker went on. “And you can’t fault a big kid for trying to expand, as well as experiencing stuff that they ain’t really been through. Micah’s only been in the league four years. There’s still experiences, stuff he ain’t been through. He ain’t ever been through real adversity yet. He hasn’t seen that. So I feel like, over time, over these next couple years of experiencing adversity, you’ll see him start to change how approaches stuff like that, like the podcast and stuff like that.”
The two will no doubt hash things out- if they haven’t already- and put this kerfuffle to bed long before they meet up again in Oxnard.
But in the meantime, it’s simply more fodder for the sky-is-falling crowd who are just waiting for things in Dallas to implode during this already-tumultuous offseason.