Jason Garrett is using Bruce Springsteen to get the Cowboys to the next level

Channeling The Boss, Garrett is trying to inspire the Cowboys to think bigger in 2017

Dallas Cowboys coach Jason Garrett was born in Pennsylvania, went to prep school in Ohio, and coaches football in Texas, but he spent a good portion of his childhood in New Jersey. Given that Garrett is a man of a certain age (he's 51 years old), it should come as no surprise that he's a fan of Bruce Springsteen. 

What might be surprising is that Garrett is using Springsteen as inspiration to take his Cowboys to the next level after they went 13-3 but lost in the divisional round of the playoffs last season. Here's how, via The MMQB:

"Have you read the Springsteen book?" Garrett said the other day in a lengthy conversation before practice. ("Born To Run," an autobiography, 2016, Simon & Schuster.) "He's 20 years old, everybody at the Jersey Shore loves him, but he's unknown nationally, and a good friend and adviser tells him, 'If you really want to be great, you've got to get off the Jersey Shore.' And so they pile everything in a couple vehicles and head west to this sort of open mike night in San Francisco.

As Springsteen wrote, the band was part of a four-band showcase; one band would get the chance to move on and perhaps get a recording contract. The Jersey guys went third and thought they killed it. The fourth band, though not as energetic, was very good. Via "Born To Run:"

"They got the gig. We lost out. After the word came down, all the other guys were complaining we'd gotten ripped off. The guy running the joint didn't know what he was doing, blah, blah, blah."

That night, Springsteen reflected, sleeping on a couch in his transplanted parents' home in the Bay Area. "My confidence was mildly shaken, and I had to make room for a rather unpleasant thought. We were not going to be the big dogs we were back in our little hometown. We were going to be one of the many very competent, very creative musical groups fighting over a very small bone. Reality check. I was good, very good, but maybe not quite as good or exceptional as I'd gotten used to people telling me, or as I thought … I was fast, but like the old gunslingers knew, there's always somebody faster, and if you can do it better than me, you earn my respect and admiration, and you inspire me to work harder. I was not a natural genius. I would have to use every ounce of what was in me -- my cunning, my musical skills, my showmanship, my intellect, my heart, my willingness -- night after night, to push myself harder, to work with more intensity than the next guy just to survive untended in the world I lived in."

How did Garrett relate that to football, and to the Cowboys? 

"People talk about taking the next step like it's some big, obvious thing," he said. "It's not. The next step happened just by working hard every day. I just told them, 'This is our story. This is us. The goal is not to be local heroes. Everything we did last year, we gotta do it again this year, and we gotta do it better.'"

That actually makes a decent amount of sense. Not just to me. Quarterback Dak Prescott, a big part of the young team's rise last season, bought into what Garrett was selling, too. 

"It hit home," Prescott said. "I felt him on that story. Here's [Springsteen] and his band, local heroes, and they go west and it doesn't work for them. That's like us, winning the division and being local heroes in our city, in our division. That's not what we want. We want to be worldwide heroes. That's what we're playing for this year -- something more than the division -- and that story reminded us you've got to work for it every day."

The Cowboys obviously have big goals, like they do every year, and now they're going to try to take them to the next level.