The National Football League's were licking their chops earlier this year when the slate of Thanksgiving games were unveiled. The league's holiday schedule was filled with high-profile teams and household names, including a featured matchup on CBS between the Kansas City Chiefs and Dallas Cowboys.
As it turns out, the star power quotient of the game has been considerably lessened by the biggest trade news to hit the NFL in a long time.
On Thursday, the Dallas Cowboys sent Micah Parsons, the single greatest pass rusher in the NFL, to the Green Bay Packers in exchange for defensive tackle Kenny Clark and two future first-round picks.
The Chiefs' matchup on Thanksgiving now looks like a vanilla, lopsided affair.
Rumors around a potential trade grew louder in recent days, but it still felt ridiculous that a franchise like Dallas would ever consider moving one of the league's most important and pivotal players. Parsons is a future first-ballot Hall of Famer who just finished his rookie deal. Yet in four NFL seasons, the four-time Pro Bowler has 52.5 sacks and is the most respected disruptor in the game.
Parsons wanted a new deal from the Cowboys, yet owner Jerry Jones sabotaged those negotiations with dramatic public displays and slander for the very player he should have been trying to lock up. Instead, Jones loses a franchise icon as he's hitting his prime for completely inexplicable reasons.
While the Chiefs have a very tough schedule ahead of them this season, the Dallas Cowboys were never listed among the most feared opponents. That said, containing Parsons was always going to be an impossible task for Chiefs' linemen, and his presence in the game was going to be an obvious talking point leading up to such a primetime event.
Now, instead of likeness of Patrick Mahomes and Parsons placed front and center in the days leading up to the game, instead of Dallas offering a real defensive challenge for the Chiefs' offense, instead of fans being able to appreciate a generational talent go against the game's greatest quarterback, the whole contest feels rather lopsided.
At one point, CBS was undoubtedly thrilled to host a matchup of the Chiefs and Cowboys. Now it looks like a current superpower taking on a vanilla opponent that just happens to have a storied past.