The question that is doing rounds in the football sports circle is whether Dallas Cowboys are mentally tough enough to win make it to the Super Bowl. Despite having a bevy of good players, they have been failing more than often when it counts most.

Dallas Cowboys- the dream team that has as yet unchallenged record of 20 consecutive winnings seasons (1966-1985) and a shared record of winning Super Bowl games 8 times with Pittsburgh Steelers, finished third among the four teams of the NFC East with 8 wins and 8 loses at the end of year 2011. The final defeat came from the hands of NY Giants who clinched the NFC East title by beating Dallas Cowboys by 31-14 in season’s final.

Dallas Cowboys’s defeat has raised eyebrows from many coaches and experts, and the team’s effort to shed the label of being mentally weak team has taken a heavy blow in view of their recent performances. It is not the sole occasion when Dallas Cowboy’s suffered the defeat but the team’s performance has been irregular since 2006 despite the fact that the team has good players and this has led to debates if they lack mental toughness and more training in football psychology which is must for these kinds of challenging games.

The question that everybody is asking is why a team with talented players is letting the game slip from their fingers especially during playoff; what is it that is making them repeat it more than often. Anyone who plays football would agree that football is a game that is requires not only strong physical attributes, abilities and training but also needs the football mind– a mind that is tenacious, a mind that remains focused and does not budge away from the goal, a mind that knows how to block the distractions of failure, missed chances, a mind that does not give up in those tense crucial and deciding moments of the game and plays the shots with confidence or shall we say football confidence.

That is belief in themselves that they can do it and can achieve what they want even in the most shaky situations than be a puppet to the opponent’s plan. This confidence is either innate to the player or comes by practicing and feeding the mind with positive thoughts and challenging oneself to do better and better in every game. Players who command this confidence do not give in during the tough situations and give peak performance in the situations which many of the people would have thought impossible.

Dallas Cowboys’s reputation is in shreds after losing consecutively for the seventh time in NFL’s season’s finale on Sunday. With the media screeching and experts making no bones about the fact that this team lacks the mental toughness which is a must if one really wants to play and more importantly win football games.

It is time that the team members and coaches take stock of the situation and introspect reasons of their 16 long years of absentia from Super bowl and plan an exit strategy to come out of this dismal situation, both for themselves and the fans who are still hoping the return of the star team.

The team members need to remind themselves that football sport requires both physical and mental strength and they will need to work on their mental toughness and develop a winning attitude than throw the game away without fighting it out to a nail biting finish.