Green Bay Packers edge-rusher doesn’t feel that he—or defensive players in general—is officiated fairly.
“Five years of not getting a call, you eventually stop worrying about it,” he told reporters Thursday. “I just got to keep going. … They don’t call offsides for offense, but they’ll call it on defense. They won’t call offensive pass interference, but they’ll call defensive pass interference immediately. We know what they’re trying to do. They wanna load the points up so fans can be happy. They’ll call defensive holding, but they won’t call offensive holding. Let’s just wake up.”
Parsons also believes the NFL protects offensive players much more than defensive players with the current rules:
Parsons is hardly the first current or former player to suggest (or downright state) that the NFL puts rules in place to promote offense and benefit offensive players. Parsons suggesting that he hasn’t gotten a call to go his way in five years is a pretty big claim, however.
But at least this season, the Packers are frustrated with a lack of holding penalties called against the offensive lineman blocking Parsons. Head coach Matt LaFleur suggested as much publicly this week, more than once:
Green Bay’s opponents have only been called for five holding calls all season, per Pro Football Talk’s Charean Williams, who added that “Parsons had an 11-game stretch last season with Dallas when he didn’t get a single holding call.”
Given his game-wrecking ability, offensive tackles are going to try to get away with as much as they can when facing him. Parsons had 52.5 sacks in 63 career games with the Dallas Cowboys in his first four seasons, and has posted 2.5 sacks and eight quarterback hits in five games for the Packers in 2025.
Perhaps those numbers would be bigger if offensive lineman were more consistently penalized for holding him. That’s seemingly the impetus for the Packers, and Parsons, publicly calling out how he’s officiated this week.
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