The reason why he is being lampooned, and will be for quite a while on his clearly ridiculous statement that shows he has very little self awareness is he was lready being shopped around by the team early on.
He is not elite. What you do in the past is not how you should be rated for the tape you put in the present or any reasonable indication of what you will do in the future.
That's not how you run a sports team, a business or a large organization. What you see is what you are getting, and you have to make good fundamentally sounds management decisions based on what is in front of your eyes.
He is not elite. He is not the best LB on the team, nor is he one of the top LBs. Tackling is not a very good metric in terms of what makes an elite LB. (Eugene Lockhart for those who have so conveniently forgotten waht a bad defence looks like.) Let's all be frank here if we took all of the Dallas linebackers and made them run competitive drills on footwork, reaction time, change of direction and we timed their perfomance I would have expected jaylon to be at the bottom of the unit in terms of timed performance.
As fans you can't be gushing about Parson and not realize that the reason why he is looking so good on tape is not because he has veteran experience to diagnose and understand plays. The real reason why he looks so good is because of his recovery speed. That is elite. Way more elite than Jaylon. Parsons makes plays because he gets to the target fast. Even as an inexperienced rookie.
Jaylon doesn't make plays because even with veteran experience he can't get to the target or to a spot on or ahead of time.
The elite train has left the station for him. We can hope for the best for him, but his physical skills are diminished, and I wonder if there is increasing problems with the drop foot that are resulting in the tape we are seeing.