Gary Pinkel, whose team is at Nevada on Friday, shared his thoughts this week on why teams often make mental errors and how to avoid them:

“You lose more games because of mental errors than any other reason,” he said. “They happen for two reasons: 1. You didn’t prepare well enough. 2 You’re not disciplined enough to maintain focus. You can’t handle thinking about the last play or the next play or the player you’re going against. Those tend to lead to more mental mistakes.

“For all those things, you learn how to prepare and focus better through experience. We try to do that in practice as much as we can. How we practice is one of the most important things we do. We put them in pressure situations in practice, make them fatigued. All those are factors involved in making mistakes and we want to prepare them. Most players, once they are in the arena, the more experiences in their preparation, the better they will react.”