Marshawn Kneeland was 24 years old. He'd just scored his first NFL touchdown 2 days before he died. Now his brain is part of the sobering scientific record on football and long-term brain damage, after Boston University's CTE Center confirmed he had Stage 1 chronic traumatic encephalopathy at the time of his death.
Former Cowboys defensive end Marshawn Kneeland has been posthumously diagnosed with CTE. https://t.co/VRKGOAeqJd
Kneeland died by suicide in November 2025 after Texas Department of Public Safety troopers tried to pull him over near Frisco and a chase ended with his car crashed. He fled on foot, and people close to him had reportedly already received a group text from him "saying goodbye." It was a brutal, fast-moving tragedy for a guy who'd been a Cowboys second-round pick out of Western Michigan in 2024 and was still very much building his career.
Stage 1 is the mildest classification BU's CTE Center uses, on a scale that runs to Stage 4. That distinction matters, and researchers were careful to attach a caveat: a postmortem CTE diagnosis should not be treated as the cause of a suicide, because suicide is complex and multifactorial. Dr. Ann McKee, who runs the BU center, has said she wasn't shocked by the finding, noting the lab has found the disease in nearly half of athletes who died before age 30 and were studied there.
That's the part that lands hardest. Kneeland wasn't a decade-plus veteran who'd absorbed a career's worth of hits. He was 2 years into the league, a rotational edge rusher who'd just made the biggest play of his young career, a blocked-punt touchdown against the Cardinals, days before everything fell apart. A brain showing measurable CTE damage that early complicates the usual framing that this disease is mostly a retired-players-in-their-40s-and-50s problem.
It also lands at a moment when the NFL still hasn't figured out how to talk about this stuff without lawyers in the room. The league settled a billion-dollar-plus concussion lawsuit with retired players nearly a decade ago, tightened return-to-play protocols, and keeps tweaking helmet tech and kickoff rules. None of that undoes cases like this one, where a young player's family is left connecting dots between football, brain trauma and mental health that science still can't fully separate.
Kneeland's case doesn't come with easy answers, and BU's own researchers are the first to say so. What it does is put another name, another young name, into a conversation the NFL keeps hoping will quiet down. It won't, not while brains from 24-year-olds keep coming back positive.