Jerry Jones has gone shopping again, and the receipt is dated 2028.

The Steelers agreed to trade cornerback Joey Porter Jr. to the Cowboys, sources confirmed to ESPN on Wednesday night. Pittsburgh gets a 2027 sixth-round pick and a 2028 second-rounder. Dallas gets a starting cornerback in the first week of October, the one moment of the season when a team can still pretend its problems are fixable.

Look at what changed hands. A sixth-round pick is a lottery ticket the size of a parking stub. The second-rounder is the real money, and it is the part that matters, because it does not arrive until the 2028 draft. The Cowboys paid for a player who suits up this season with a asset that does not exist yet. That is the oldest trick in the sport: the buyer pays in future, the seller banks the present, and the only person who has to live with the exchange rate is whoever is running the draft room two springs from now.

In Dallas, that person has always been Jones, who owns the team and also sits in the general manager's chair, so he is both the customer and the cashier. Nobody in the building is positioned to tell him the price is high. A franchise with one man on both sides of the counter will always find the trade that feels like a statement.

Pittsburgh, for its part, took a second-round pick for a cornerback it drafted and developed, which in a league that treats picks as spendable cash looks like a respectable exit.

The Cowboys needed help in the secondary. They bought it with 2028 money. The bill will arrive on schedule, and Jones will not be asked to check it.