When Brian Schottenheimer addressed his Cowboys at halftime on Sunday, no one was using the tragic events of Nov. 6 to excuse what had happened in the first 30 minutes, or to motivate a better showing over the final 30 minutes against the reigning world champs.
At that point, the first-year head coach was simply trying to beat the Eagles.
“So I challenged them at halftime on the fact that we were beating ourselves, and if we just started executing a little bit better, we’d be fine—and the belief was there,” Schottenheimer told me over the phone a few minutes after it was over. “I literally asked the guys, I said, Do you guys believe? And to a frickin’ man, they all screamed, ‘Yes.’”
It’s the sort of simplistic thing any football coach, at any level, might ask his team when faced with a double-digit deficit. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. In this case, it did, and the Cowboys did play better football, kept chipping away and eventually dug all the way out of a 21–0 hole to beat Philadelphia 24–21 on a walk-off, game-winning field goal.
Still, with all that established, Marshawn Kneeland never left the Cowboys’ minds Sunday.
The team’s promising young defensive end has been gone for 18 days now, and that means a lot of the young men are still dealing with the loss of their teammate. As such, there was a proper perspective to put it in that the coaches and players had to find, to prepare themselves for the Raiders on Monday in Week 11, then the Eagles on a short week and, from here, the Chiefs, whom the Cowboys will host on Thanksgiving.
Here’s how the Cowboys found it, knowing they had a chance to tell his story in how they played football these past two weeks.
“The resilience of this team was tested with the loss of Marshawn, and much bigger than football, right?” Schottenheimer said. “But the distraction of being able to do what we love to do and to honor Marshawn is what motivates us. I would say it that way. We want to play well, we want to win to honor Marshawn. Because the way Marshawn played the game, Albert, I mean, he played the game with his hair on fire, man. He absolutely was just incredibly passionate on the football field.
“I think that’s what you’re seeing from our football team.”
Anyone watching Sunday could confirm that.
Marshawn Kneeland was in his second NFL season. / Kevin Jairaj-Imagn Images
Kneeland’s death occurred during the Cowboys’ bye week, after much of the team had dispersed around the country to get a break before the season’s stretch run. So as the news spread, there was really no way to get everyone together en masse.
“The last thing you want to ever have to deal with is that situation,” Schottenheimer said, “and then you have to deal with it over the phone.”
On the flip side, that Dallas’s first game back was on a Monday night gave the staff an extra day to work as players returned to the facility, and Schottenheimer devoted that day solely to coping with this crisis. On Monday, Nov. 10, there was no football. The Cowboys gathered, instead, to be together, honor Kneeland and lean on one another.
“We had a team meeting and we just talked and we laughed and we cried and we cried some more,” Schottenheimer continued. “We had some experts there that we could talk to, we had breakout sessions where we could talk about it, share our feelings. I’m telling you, man, the healing for me started the minute I could put my arms around some of these guys, and tell them I love them and tell them how much I miss Marshawn, and that just kind of started it.
“And we have such a great culture, man. And I know some people think that’s bulls—. But this locker room is different. This locker room is special. This locker room loves one another. This locker room will fight to the end for one another, and Marshawn was a huge part of that. And if anything, I think it’s kind of brought us even closer together.”
It had to, as Schottenheimer saw it, because that’s what his players needed.
Oftentimes, in situations such as these, individual players will emerge as keys to healing the group. So as the Cowboys’ coach and I talked, I figured I’d ask if that was the case here.
“The answer is yes,” he said. “But what I don’t want to do is isolate and handpick three or four guys, because it was really everybody. If you could have been a fly on the wall in some of these breakout meetings, and listen to people talk about just how it affected them and impacted them, and how much pain they were going through, trying to ask the questions why, Man, what could we have done differently …
Schottenheimer’s voice trailed off a bit, and then he continued.
“But I will say this, instead of an individual, the defensive line was incredible, all of them,” he said. “Osa [Odighizuwa]. Solomon Thomas unfortunately has been through this with his sister. Donovan Ezeiruaku, the rookie, he’s a stud. And Jadeveon Clowney and Dante Fowler, the defensive line, they’ve been incredible through this. And it was their closest brother. We all loved him, and we were all family. But those guys were incredible this entire time.”
And over the last 30 minutes Sunday, that energy Schottenheimer talked about that existed in Kneeland’s game was splashed all over the field at AT&T Stadium.
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A lot of weird stuff happened in the third and fourth quarters of Sunday’s game. Jake Elliott missed his first field goal of November after an offensive pass interference flag on DeVonta Smith short-circuited a drive. Saquon Barkley lost his first fumble of the season on a beautiful strip by Sam Williams. And when that turnover failed to produce points for Dallas, Markquese Bell and Alijah Clark violently arrived at punt returner Xavier Gipson, jarring the ball loose to give Dallas possession at the Philly 8.
And when that didn’t end in a Dallas score, either, with a fourth-and-goal gamble from the 1-yard line falling short (“I knew I was gonna do that and I’d do it again. I wanted to try to put that team away,” Schottenheimer said.), the Cowboys still needed the luck of a Jake Ferguson fumble bouncing out of bounds, right by the head coach, to get to Brandon Aubrey’s eventual 42-yard game-winner.
So, yes, the Cowboys got some breaks. Lots of them at the end, too, after a ton of stuff went wrong earlier in the game. But, no, Schottenheimer wasn’t going to go with the idea that there was some sort of higher power at work here. While he wanted to do Kneeland proud, and could talk as long as you’d want him to about how unified his team has been through tragedy, he also wants to do right by the guys who are going through it.
“I really don’t think so,” he said. “I do think this: It’s been very well-noted that our defense up until the bye had really struggled. Obviously, they played really well last week. They played great again tonight, in terms of stopping the run. That’s two weeks in a row [that] teams haven’t even tried to run the ball. I mean, you hold Saquon Barkley to 10 carries for 22 yards, man? But I think the confidence is there because we know how good we are as an offense, we know how fast we can score, how explosive we can be.
“And now that the defense is playing to the level that they’re playing to, there’s a confidence about this team. But I do think that when you go through pain and you go through incredible loss and grief, there’s major power that comes with that. There’s major power that goes into that.”
From a football standpoint, there’s no question the Cowboys have made strides.
The offense, as Schottenheimer said, is among the NFL’s most potent. Dak Prescott is playing good ball, Javonte Williams is approaching 1,000 yards rushing, George Pickens has 67 catches for 1,054 yards and eight touchdowns in 11 games, and he and No. 1 target CeeDee Lamb have meshed nicely. A young line is getting better, too. Meanwhile, the significant investment in the interior of the defensive line has looked smart the past two weeks, as Matt Eberflus’s unit looks to turn the corner—last week against a shaky foe, this week against a good one.
And then, there’s the intangible piece where there seems to be something bigger at work between the players on the team.
Along those lines, this week would’ve been an easy one to trip up on. After the emotional toll of the past few weeks, and then arriving home from Vegas at 4 a.m. Tuesday, it would have been easy for reality to set in a bit and the weight of it all to strike. That could’ve happened when the Eagles raced to a 21–0 lead, too.
Instead, it was just the opposite.
“We are connected for life through this,” Schottenheimer said. “And, even tonight, we came in here after the big win and we had a flag that was made to honor Marshawn that Osa carried out for defensive introductions. The guys were in the middle of the locker room just dancing and passing the flag around to each other. And I mean, it just warmed my heart, man. It really did.
“It just made me … I just knew he was looking down on us and he was so proud of what these guys were able to overcome.”
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