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Todd Archer
FRISCO, Texas — DeMarvion Overshown knew it was bad.
«Going down, I felt all the ligaments tearing one by one by one,» the Dallas Cowboys linebacker said, remembering what happened with 12:49 left in the fourth quarter of the Dec. 9, 2024, game against the Cincinnati Bengals.
Confirmation would come the next morning after an MRI, but Overshown knew. He did not need to see the replay of his right knee getting caved in by a Bengals offensive lineman on a 2-yard run to the left.
The ACL and MCL were torn. The posterior cruciate ligament was ripped from the bone. Only the lateral collateral ligament was still attached.
Overshown could not move his leg. He was in pain, but the pounding of his fist on the turf was more about disappointment. As Cowboys medical staff members made their way to Overshown, he had one request: no medical cart.
«If this is going to be the last time I’m on the field, I want to be able to walk off,» Overshown said. «I don’t want no cart because this is it for the 2024 season for me.»
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Until that moment, it had been quite the season for the 2023 third-round draft pick.
Overshown was the Cowboys’ second-leading tackler and had become the third Cowboy since 1982 to record at least five sacks, an interception (which he returned for a touchdown), a fumble recovery and a forced fumble in the same season, joining DeMarcus Ware (2006) and Greg Ellis (1999).
On the slow walk to the locker room, his thoughts immediately turned to 2025.
With his left arm draped over director of team security Cable Johnson and his right arm over associate athletic trainer/director of rehabilitation Britt Brown, a conversation set in motion the nearly yearlong recovery plan for his traumatic injury.
Monday night, at Allegiant Stadium against the Las Vegas Raiders (8:15 p.m. ET, ABC/ESPN), 343 days after suffering the devastating injury, Overshown will return to the field.
«What do I got to do to come back?» Overshown asked Brown. «How long are we looking at?»
«It’s going to be hard. Harder than the first one,» Brown said, alluding to the torn ACL Overshown suffered in his left knee that cost him his rookie season in 2023. «But if there’s anybody that can beat the odds, it’s you.»
«Nothing fazes him,» Brown said.
Before Overshown left the locker room on the night of the injury, two teammates were inconsolable as they talked with him, but he told them, «I’m fine. You know why? Because I know I can handle this.»
That resolve comes from his mother, Felecia Williams, who worked as a custodian and in home healthcare to support DeMarvion and his three siblings, who were raised in Arp, Texas, a small East Texas town about 120 miles from Dallas.
«My siblings, we a year apart, so you think about four growing teenagers at one time and then four almost in diapers at one point,» Overshown said. «My mom done it all and she cried. She cried. But those was tears of strength because she never gave up. She never let us know that it wasn’t OK. I thought that I had the best childhood growing up. I wouldn’t realize that I was underclass until I got to where I am right now. The way we live, she made sure that we was OK. So I am great.
«This injury? Anything that happens to me from here out, it would never compare to what my mom had to go through raising us.»
Nick Chubb and Willis McGahee came back from three torn ligaments in their knees to play. Former Cowboys tight end Mike Lucky played two seasons after tearing the ACL, PCL and MCL in his knee in 2000.
Overshown spent hours with physical therapist and assistant athletic trainer Hanson Yang «priming up the tiny muscles» in his knee, hip and feet. Strength and conditioning coordinator Harold Nash and his staff helped keep the rest of Overshown’s body strong and, when the knee was healthy enough, put him through football drills.
The bulk of Overshown’s time, however, was spent with Brown, who has been with the Cowboys for 31 years.
Brown couldn’t quantify the hours involved. Neither could Overshown. But there wasn’t a day when one was there, and the other wasn’t.
«It’s tough love,» Overshown said. «I don’t think nobody going to want it more than those guys that work in that training room. Those guys you see every day, that’s their mission to make sure you’re at your best. Forget what they got going on, forget what they get paid. Their mission is to make sure you’re at your best, whatever is in your best interest.
«Me and Britt, we got that understanding and our hearts have been connected since.»
A bond that was first forged during his left ACL rehab in 2023 grew stronger during the past 11 months.
«He wanted to do everything the right way,» Brown said. «I mean, he was always on time. Guys like that are easy for me. I struggle with the guys that don’t want to work, don’t see the reason they need to work, don’t want to be here when they need to do it, don’t show up at all or are late. Those are the ones that I have a problem with, and that guy was never, ever not on time and never, ever not willing to work or do whatever needed to be.
«There was not one time, I can tell you that. None.»
ABOUT A WEEK before training camp in July, Brown and Overshown visited ElAttrache for a checkup. Overshown was cleared. The knee was healthy. But there is a difference in the knee being sound and ready to play football.
Overshown knew he needed time. He battled through some calf soreness. In training camp, a cyst burst in his knee. But nothing rattled him.
«I had all the faith in the world that I was fixed. Now it was just overcoming the pain,» he said. «It was becoming a football player again, an NFL football player again. And that’s how it was. I attacked it every day as if I’m as healthy as I can be today, now it’s my job to get to the next step. That’s how I challenged myself. I wanted to be the best torn ACL, MCL, PCL guy there was.»
Before Overshown’s 21-day practice window opened on Oct. 22, he visited ElAttrache once again in California. All of the force-plate testing numbers that measured rebound energy and velocity in his right knee were better than before his injury.
«His protoplasm is not like yours and mine,» Brown said.
Since he began practicing, Overshown felt relieved to be sore from football, not rehab. Each day, the knee felt fine. But then on Oct. 30, he dislocated his thumb, which reporters could see as he walked into the facility at the start of practice.
All of the hours fixing his knee, and the thumb was going to be an issue?
«At first I didn’t want to walk off the field,» Overshown said. «I was like, ‘All right, here go the pictures,’ and, ‘Oh, this guy can’t stay on the field. Oh, this guy is glass.’ But we was hoping he could just pop it back in. It’s a finger. It’s football. People dislocate or pop their fingers out of place all the time.»
Overshown returned to practice in a matter of minutes, bringing a feeling of relief to Brown as much as to teammates.
Along the way to his comeback, Overshown marked off occasions on a calendar.
In February, he made sure he was off crutches to go to a bachelor party for a wedding in which he was the best man. In March, he proposed to his girlfriend, Alexis Babino, only when he knew his right knee could take it. He wanted to make sure he could dance at some of the spring weddings he attended.
In June, he and Babino welcomed their second child, a boy, Texas Lee.
«If they say in two weeks I’m supposed to be riding a bike,» he said. «Well, I’m finna do it in one week.»
The months, weeks and days are now behind him. All that is left now is hours. The return is finally here, less than a calendar year — certainly sooner than many thought — since he suffered the injury.
Thinking about Monday’s kickoff, the emotions creep into Overshown and Brown.
«Satisfaction,» Brown said when asked what he will be thinking about as he sees Overshown on the field. «For all of us. I mean for the whole training staff, for that matter. Strength staff. Because all these guys, I mean everybody touches these guys. We helped them. It’s just a matter of helping them.
«For me, I just want to help them play, help them earn their money for their families, be able to go back and do what they have wanted to do since they were 8 years old, especially a guy like D-Mo.»
Tears welled in Brown’s eyes.
«Yeah, it’ll be hard,» he said. «I’ll try to keep it together. Trying to keep together now.»
As much as his conversation with Brown as they walked off the AT&T Stadium field to the locker room is etched into Overshown’s memory, he sees another picture in his mind now.
«I’m probably going to cry,» Overshown said. «I’m going to hug him tight. Because, man, he knows every day. Some days, we talked, and it was like, ‘We’re going to be all right, man. You’re going to be good.’ And what I do? I smiled and we got our work in. And so if anybody knows, he knows that every day I came here to work.
«I just wanted what was best for the team. I wanted to be myself again. And he never let me down. I told him that. I texted him in a long message. I’m like, ‘I appreciate you for not giving up on me. I appreciate you for not letting me give up on myself.'»
