LAS VEGAS — He felt a torrent of emotions during a three-hour stint in the national spotlight, experiencing bursts of grief and compassion and pride and competitive fire while maintaining an almost preternatural focus. Now, as he dressed in the visitors’ locker room at Allegiant Stadium Monday night, Dak Prescott channeled a sentiment that few outsiders would have foreseen.
In the wake of a tragedy that shook the quarterback and his Dallas Cowboys teammates to their core — and brought him back to a hauntingly familiar place — Prescott might have been excused for sounding defeated.
Instead, he was defiant.
To be clear, the Cowboys’ 33-16 victory over the Las Vegas Raiders didn’t salve a locker room reeling from the death of 24-year-old defensive end Marshawn Kneeland, who’d taken his own life 11 days earlier. That loss was bigger than football, and it will linger, likely for a long, long time.
After winning for the first time in nearly a month, Prescott and his teammates weren’t suggesting that anything they might accomplish on the scoreboard or in the standings will heal them, and neither will we.
Yet Prescott, whose own brother, Jace, committed suicide in 2020, has learned to plow through his misery and ply his trade as a matter of self-preservation. As the unquestioned leader of a highly scrutinized team, he doesn’t have the luxury of marginalizing football and retreating into an introspective shell.
He trudges forward, does the best he can and hopes his resilience rubs off on others.
“That’s my story,” Prescott told me after Monday’s game. “Who I’ve lost has been what inspires. You’ve got a responsibility; you’re carrying the light. And anything else like this is just gas to the fire.”
The veteran quarterback believes his best coping mechanism is to open his heart, zero in on his goal and go for it — and try to bring people along with him. And what he saw on Monday, in the Cowboys’ first game since Kneeland’s death, convinced him that this 4-5-1 team can somehow fight its way back into championship contention.
“We’ve got a hell of a road ahead of us,” Prescott said. “And I think that’s the best part of it — we ain’t got no bulls— ahead, where we can lose focus. Like, hell no, we can’t lose focus — not for a second, not for a day, not for a moment of the training.
“S—, we want to make the playoffs? We got to go beat some playoff teams. And it’s not ‘one game at a time.’ We don’t have that luxury. We’ve got to think of the whole thing. We have to go on a run. And we’re going to do it together.”
Cowboys QB Dak Prescott relied on tragically familiar coping mechanisms after a teammate’s death. (Christian Petersen / Getty Images)
In taking apart the Raiders (2-8), one of the NFL’s most feeble bottom-feeders, the Cowboys, for the first time in 2025, resembled their superlative selves. Prescott (25-of-33, 268 yards, four touchdowns, no interceptions) zipped pinpoint passes to prolific wide receivers George Pickens and CeeDee Lamb, while a juiced-up defense limited the Raiders to 27 rushing yards and one fourth-quarter touchdown.
It was a promising performance, but a potentially deceiving one: Over the next 17 days, Dallas, which still hasn’t beaten a team with a winning record, faces last year’s Super Bowl participants (the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs) and the team that had the NFC’s best regular-season record in 2024 (the Detroit Lions).
Even the Cowboys’ biggest hype man, 83-year-old owner Jerry Jones, conceded after Monday’s game that a playoff run might be a bit ambitious.
“It’s probably a little late in the game,” he told The Athletic. “But if not this season, our future is looking brighter.”
In Jones’ eyes, the acquisition of three-time Pro Bowl defensive tackle Quinnen Williams shortly before the Nov. 4 trade deadline was a game-changer in that regard.
“The timing of bringing in a player like that is right for us,” said Jones, who riled Cowboys fans by trading star pass rusher Micah Parsons to the Green Bay Packers shortly before the season. “I do care if we get a shot at the playoffs (this season), but the main thing is we all need to be feeling good for the future. Our fans needed this.
“You saw it tonight — when you get a guy like that on the interior who can collapse the pocket, it’s beat-up time. We haven’t had that in a long time, and it’s cost us in those playoff games we’ve lost, because the team we’re playing usually has that and we don’t. Now, we do.”
Williams was a force against the Raiders, tallying 1.5 sacks, a tackle for loss and five quarterback hits. He was one of many reinforcements to bolster a struggling Dallas defense. Safeties Malik Hooker and Donovan Wilson returned from prolonged health-related absences; another trade acquisition, linebacker Logan Wilson, made his Cowboys debut, as did third-round rookie cornerback Shavon Revel Jr., who tore his ACL early in his final college season. Dynamic linebacker DeMarvion Overshown played his first game since suffering a severe knee injury last December.
Could this be the start of something big? In the eyes of the Cowboys’ players, it had better be.
“We know we’ve got to go on a run,” said veteran defensive end Jadeveon Clowney, who signed with the team in mid-September and made his debut in a 40-40 tie with the Packers in Week 4. “… And we’re just trying to stack wins, one at a time.”
To Clowney, the idea of the Cowboys making a postseason run seems plausible.
“It’s not crazy to me,” he said. “I was trying to figure out how we kept losing early in this season, with all this talent around. And it was kind of blowing me away, for a long time. I kept telling them, ‘I’ve been on six other teams, and this one is the most talented team I’ve been on. I’m trying to figure out why we can’t get these wins and stack them.’ Hopefully, from this game on, we can start stacking them.”
To have a hope of doing that, the Cowboys will have to summon the same level of focus that fueled them on Monday night. To their credit, they managed to carry Kneeland in their thoughts without cheapening the act. Like most of his teammates, Clowney, who said he’d relied on Kneeland to help him with defensive calls as he acclimated to a new system, understood the limitations of losing himself in his vocation amid truly tragic circumstances.
“It’s a hard feeling when you look over there and don’t see your teammate anymore,” Clowney said. “He was 24 years old; that’s too young. It kind of crushed everybody. It’s football. This ain’t life. This ain’t my kids. It ain’t my family. This ain’t everything. I think we take it that way, like it’s everything. But it’s not.”
And yet, Clowney conceded, being surrounded by dozens of others experiencing those same feelings has been comforting.
“I think it brought us closer together as a team,” he said. “It’s not just for ourselves now. We’re trying to represent him also. It made us a lot more locked in, a lot more focused. Because we know how he would treat the situation. He was a guy who came to work and worked hard every day, ran to the ball and did everything the right way. So, I think guys won’t take this for granted. You never know when it’s gonna be your last game.”
Echoed Prescott: “You’re tired. You’re a little upset. Well, there’s a brother that we had here that can’t be tired, that can’t do that. So, you’ve got to carry that; you’ve got to take his energy and push it with you.”
On Monday night, at least, the formula worked. Prescott, universally lauded for his leadership, exuded positive energy, if only as a familiar coping strategy. And rookie coach Brian Schottenheimer — whose empathy and people skills helped propel him to the position — made a convincing case that honoring Kneeland through passionate and purposeful play was a valiant gesture. He and his assistants also kept the offensive and defensive game plans relatively simple, an acknowledgment of how overwhelmed the Cowboys’ players were in the days leading up to the game.
“They’ve been through a lot,” Schottenheimer explained, “so we kept the packages light.”
Cowboys coach Brian Schottenheimer wore a shirt honoring Marshawn Kneeland during his team’s win over the Raiders. (Ian Maule / Getty Images)
Few men in the coaching profession ever let the tears flow as freely as Schottenheimer’s late father, Marty, and after the game Brian carried on the family tradition.
“I’m proud of you,” a choked-up Schottenheimer told his players, “and you made Marshawn proud tonight.”
The coach reiterated those sentiments more than an hour after the game while leaning on a metal barrier separating the narrow passageway to the Cowboys’ team buses from the Raiders’ player parking lot. He had just visited with a quarterback he’d once coached in Seattle, Raiders starter Geno Smith, who reached over the fence to plant a hug on the former Seahawks offensive coordinator. A few seconds later, Schottenheimer received an affectionate shoulder squeeze from Prescott as Dallas’ QB1 headed out of the stadium and into the cloudy Vegas night.
Now Schottenheimer looked at me, and his eyes welled up again.
“You didn’t know Marshawn,” he said, “but he played so hard. Tonight, they honored him. Our defense was just different. That’s the most f—– focused they’ve been all season. I think that’s why I was so emotional.”
Can those same emotions stay with the Cowboys in the coming weeks as they try to do something unlikely and monumental? Can Kneeland’s memory, and the grief that accompanies it, be the “gas to the fire” that their quarterback envisions?
It’s a big ask, and on some level, Prescott and his teammates know it’s a partly disingenuous one. Football is just football; they’ve been touched by something deeper and darker. That’s reality, and no locker-room speech can make it all OK.
The best the Cowboys can do is to carry Kneeland in their thoughts and attempt to draw power from his memory while doing whatever they can to feel his presence.
“The score was 33-16,” Schottenheimer noted before heading to the bus, a long flight home and an uncertain future awaiting him. “Add it up, that’s 49. Now (transpose) those numbers.”
That’s 94, Kneeland’s uniform number — the inspiration for a helmet decal the Cowboys will wear for the rest of the season. Their fallen teammate will be on their minds, and in their hearts, and nothing about this will be easy.
As Prescott said, the Cowboys have a hell of a road ahead of them. They’re grateful to be on that road together.
