First smell test of the year with NFL plays coming up in about 25 minutes.

Ben Standing is with us in his normal spot.

He'll be with us Mondays at 12, Fridays at 12, and whenever we want them in between.

Ben just put out on his substack, his seventh annual NFL agent survey. Always really interesting

stuff from it. We're going to talk a little bit about that to start, and then we will get to

Ben's season prediction and previewing and picking the game on Sunday and talking about

some of the injuries

that will be a factor in Sunday's games. So I really do enjoy this read every year. It was a great

idea to do this when you started it. I think there's some significant learnings that not,

you know, normal fans tend not to know and even people in the know, you know, learn a lot from a lot of this.

What were the big takeaways for you from this year's survey?

Yeah.

You know, it covers the range of, you know, what do people think of general managers and talent evaluators? How do they look at different

organizations, the good and the questionable, we'll say. But there are also topics like, you know,

what's in the news. And the Jerry Jones, Michael Parsons trade, obviously, has been very much in the news.

And I thought what was interesting is the immediate reaction that everybody had seemingly was

Gary Jones screwed this up. Jerry Jones botched this. And I think there's a case to be made. If he's going to trade Parsons, he should have done it back in, like, the spring, when there would have been more teams potentially in the mix to take on a guy with that kind of salary. But that said, I was pretty surprised, to be honest. Certainly there were more agents who were in that first camp, but there was enough who said, yeah, they kind of buy what Jerry was selling in terms of, you know, what they ultimately came down to, he couldn't spend all the money on, basically three players they've already given Dak Prescott and CD Lamb a ton of money.

If they had signed Michael Parsons to essentially the deal we got to Green Bay,

those three guys, I think, would be like half of the Dallas salary cap, something like that.

And also, a lot of people said, hey, look, there's definitely some smoke by the idea that

Michael Parsons was not necessarily a great fit in the locker room.

DeMarcus Lawrence last year, this offseason went left out to go sign in Seattle.

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