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Being a fan of the Dallas Cowboys can be extremely difficult.
It’s not that the Cowboys are terrible.
In fact, they’ve been far from it in recent years.
Dallas’ 94 regular-season wins over the last 10 seasons ranks seventh-best in the entire NFL.
But when push comes to shove, the Cowboys always find a way to fall flat on their faces. And they often do so in the most painful ways possible.
Whether it’s Dak Prescott, Tony Romo, Jason Garrett or a leaky defense, when the pressure is on and the stakes are high, Dallas repeatedly comes up empty.
It’s why the franchise has not reached an NFC Championship game in over a quarter century.
But Prescott is trying to break those habits. And to do so, he enlisted the help of former Navy Seals to help Cowboys players gain a “mental edge,” according to Yahoo Sports’ Jori Epstein.
The company Prescott chose to work with, O2X, “tailors workshops around nutrition, sleep, conditioning, resilience and stress management.”
As part of the training, O2x put together a thought exercise.
“In the center of a chandelier-lit ballroom, Cowboys players divided into two teams. Each team received a concentration grid, the posters including every number from zero to 99 in jumbled fashion. The teams were to race: Which group could find every number on the poster, in descending order, most quickly? And how calmly could players execute these decisions when the pressure of competition was on,” Epstein wrote.
Players also wore heart-rate monitors during the exercise to show how increased heart rate can affect decision making.
One of the two teams celebrated after winning by just .02 seconds.
But there was a problem.
The team that finished first reportedly missed the number ‘2’.
“The small things, the details, that all matters,” CeeDee Lamb told Epstein. “Knowing your job, knowing your responsibility and what you gotta do next.
“It’s the difference between winning and losing.”
If that’s not the most Cowboys thing ever…