FRISCO, TEXAS

Malcolm Gladwell can bend over and snap his 10,000-hour theory through his legs and out the window. Louis-Philippe “L.P.” Ladouceur became an outlier at his craft practically from the start.

His craft? Long-snapping inflated, leather, prolate spheroids -- aka footballs.

The native of west-island Montreal is a master at it. And he has earned a lucrative living at it for the past 12 years on America’s Team: the Dallas Cowboys of the NFL. At age 35, Ladouceur is as good at his craft as ever. And probably as good as any long snapper in pro football history.

Because, incredibly, he never has mis-snapped a football as a pro.

“I’m not going to let these guys down,” Ladouceur said by phone Wednesday from the Cowboys’ new homage to marble and glass that doubles as team headquarters and training facility, in the northern boonies of suburban Dallas. “I don’t ever want to let these guys around me down by having a bad snap or anything. That’d be the worst thing possible in my mind.

“That’s probably what’s been driving me to play all these years, and to keep the streak going. We’re in a good place right now, this team, and we’re looking forward to the next challenge.”

That challenge comes Sunday, when Ladouceur and 45 other Cowboys square off against the red-hot Green Bay Packers (11-6) at massive AT&T Stadium, in an NFC divisional playoff game (4:40 p.m. EST, CTV via FOX). Win, and the Cowboys (13-3) will play host to Saturday’s Seattle-Atlanta winner next Sunday in the NFC championship, with a Super Bowl berth up for grabs.

It seems outlandish to say, but it’s true: no other Cowboy, indeed no other NFLer, is better at what he does than Ladouceur. Not Ezekiel Elliott. Not Dez Bryant. Not even Tom Brady or Aaron Rodgers. Nor any other long snapper in pro football history.

“I’d say that’s accurate, yes,” Cowboys placekicker Dan Bailey said after Friday morning’s practice. “It doesn’t matter what position you play in this league. If you can play for 12 years, you’re obviously doing something right -- and not only in games. It means you’re approaching things right in the off-season and practice too. He’s just a true pro.”

Ladouceur has snapped the football back cleanly on all 1,723 attempts since the Cowboys hired him in Week 4 of the 2005 season. No flubs, no skips, no overthrows. Just clean, fast, hard, reliably placed snaps. Every. Single. Time.

On 831 punts.

On 371 field-goal attempts.

On 521 extra points.

“Wow, that’s impressive, 12 years,” said Mike Westhoff, who coached NFL special teams for 30 seasons with Indianapolis, Miami and the New York Jets before retiring in 2014.

Westhoff pioneered countless special-teams concepts and practices, and still is consulted for ideas and schemes by coaches and rules-makers alike. Of course, he remembers Ladouceur.

“It’s rare that someone has that kind of ability to sustain that streak,” Westhoff said. “It’s rare, very rare to be that efficient. He goes into that really special category -- just a handful of guys, maybe.”

Gladwell, author of the best-selling 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success, argued that it takes about 10,000 hours before one can truly master anything. If true, Ladouceur is an outlier among outliers.

Besides, anyone who snaps a football for 10,000 hours over even four years probably would tear his fingers to shreds. That’d be almost seven hours a day, every day, for four years. Uh, no.

Ladouceur said he became good at snapping footballs soon after trying out at the college level, at the University of California, where he’d earned an athletic scholarship early last decade as a defensive end. Then, it was a matter of probably hundreds, not thousands, of hours to refine his skills.

“I was decent when I started. And then, kind of, it’s your craft, your art. So you get better at it. And you don’t have to go to school for it,” he said.

If you think long-snapping is an easy task -- bending forward, looking back upside down between your legs and spiral-throwing a football backward, straight and hard, either eight yards behind you, chest high to the kneeling holder on a placekick, or 15 yards chest-high to a standing punter -- you’re wrong. Maybe two-thirds of the NFL’s 32 teams in any year have a snapper they’d fight to keep; the rest are in perpetual search of an ace. Aspiring replacements are always trying out across the league, in season and out.

That’s how the Cowboys discovered Ladouceur, during a week-long stay-over in California between regular-season games in 2005. Then-head coach Bill Parcells was unhappy with Jon Condo, and gave a “local” kid -- Ladouceur, who remained in the Bay Area after his career with the Cal Bears concluded -- a try. He’d had a failed summer tryout that year with the New Orleans Saints.

A snapping star was born. That fast.

A dozen years later, you might be shocked to learn how infrequently Ladouceur actually practises snapping.

“I do about 25 to 30 a day, tops, during the season,” he said. “And that’s, really, just two days a week,” he said. “We do special teams Wednesdays and Fridays, and then games on Sundays (game days). So it’s three times a week, total.

“Then in the off-season I don’t do much. I try to do as little as possible. It’s like being a pitcher, or a quarterback -- you can get shoulder, elbow (injuries) because you routinely do the same things. So you don’t want to do too much. But on a given week I’d say I snap between 80 and 120 balls.”

To fully appreciate Ladouceur’s streak of perfection, you have to know his level of precision.

Take the field-goal or extra-point snap. Does it matter how many times the ball rotates on his send-back? You bet.

When Ladouceur grips the football’s laces, bends forward and, on signal, zips it back to holder (and punter) Chris Jones, the football will rotate exactly two-and-a-half times, so that when it hits Jones’s hands, the laces face skyward. That way, when Jones places the ball point-down a fraction of a second before placekicker Bailey swings his foot into it, he doesn’t have to spin the ball. The laces already face forward, away from Bailey’s impact spot on the football -- which is how most kickers prefer it.

Consistent accuracy is everything in long-snapping, just as in throwing footballs or baseballs, or hitting golf balls or tennis balls. Ladouceur is so reliably proficient on placekick snaps, his footballs rotate the desired 2.5 times, well, almost always.

“I do that out of 100 balls probably 96, 97 times. So there are two or three that maybe are a little off. This year I’ve had two or three that have been off a bit, so that’s about right.”

How far off?

“It’s very rare that he snaps anything past a quarter-turn off,” Bailey said.

What helps Ladouceur is his size. He’s 6-foot-5, 265 pounds.

“I’m a bigger guy,” he said. “So my hand’s a little bit bigger than the average guy, and that ball being a little smaller in my hand probably makes it a little easier for me to grip it and release it.”

As for punt snaps, is there a desired number of rotations on those?

“Naw, because the punters have to move the ball again anyways, so you don’t gauge that,” Ladouceur said. “But at 15 yards it’s different, because you have to block defenders on those after snapping, and sometimes you have wind, so those are different.”

Right, blocking.

It’s now illegal in the NFL for defensive linemen lined up across from the long snapper to hit him or attempt to blow through him the moment he snaps the ball. That’s a 15-yard penalty.

“So you don’t have anybody on you, beatin’ the hell out of you like you used to have,” Westhoff said. “You had to have a bigger guy before the rules changes, whereas the long snappers today are all specialists; they’re 225-pound guys. Linebacker size. They don’t have to be big.

“I know Ladouceur’s a big guy. He’s the old type. I remember him as being such a good, solid technician -- a good, wide stance, too. He just presented the picture of a good snapper to me -- his base, his legs, the spread, his ability to fire his arms. All the little things that I would teach, he incorporated.”

Bailey has worked closely with Ladouceur and Jones for six years, all year round. His take on Ladouceur’s secret?

“Really it’s just his approach,” Bailey said. “He doesn’t try to over-complicate things. You can tell it definitely comes naturally to him. He’s just got a feel. It’s kind of like a golfer with a good short game. He kind of just has the right feel for it. He knows whenever he’s just a little bit off, and the next snap he’s got it corrected already.”

The other Canadian on America’s Team -- fifth-year defensive end Tyrone Crawford of Windsor, Ont. -- knows Ladouceur well, and also points to his focus.

“He’s got that Tiger Woods mentality,” Crawford said. “Speaking of that, he plays golf really well too. He knows how to just dial in. That’s why he’s so good at his job.”

The new rules undoubtedly will help to prolong long snappers’ careers. Ladouceur, though, never missed a game in the old days, or in any of his days with the Cowboys. That’s a hell of an accomplishment, Westhoff said.

“I played in the years when after every snap I wound up on my back, and my knees were twisted,” said Ladouceur, who is married with two young children and lives out in the country. “I don’t know how I made it out of it unscathed.

“I’ve twisted an ankle, twisted a couple of knees, but never bad enough to get me out of a game. I’m lucky that the position I play at, you can kind of get away with not running fast sometimes. You’ve just got to get in the way. That’s something I’ve learned over the years. As long as you put me in there, I can brace it up, I can tape it up and I can kind of figure it out.”

Sunday’s will be Ladouceur’s seventh career playoff game. Same as long-time Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, now Dak Prescott’s backup. Only tight end Jason Witten among current Cowboys will have played in more post-season games (eight).

Ladouceur turns 36 in March. He has one more year to go on his second five-year contract with the Cowboys. According to sports-salaries website Spotrac.com, the Pointe-Claire, Que., native has earned $9.4 million in the NFL so far, including $1.05 million this season. He’s due to earn $1.1 million next season.

How much longer can he go?

“Well, at my position you can play until you’re 38 or 39,” he said. “There’s a little bit of football left in this body. I don’t know how long, but there is some. I feel great, my body feels great, I’m in good shape. My kids are keeping me young, which is good. And these other players are young, so they’re keeping me young here too. Some guys on this team are nearly 15 years younger than me.”

Finally, what about the streak? Is it something Ladouceur thinks about often? Or does he just not go there? You know, jinxes and stuff.

“I don’t really think about it that way. I’m not a superstitious man. I just keep going. That’s the main thing. Every day I approach it the same way, and when you get to the games it just makes it so much easier if you worked hard during the week.

“After 12 years, if you’re not confident enough, then you have issues. Confidence is the main thing here.”

NO JORDY FOR PACKERS

FRISCO, Texas – The good news for the Dallas Cowboys is that Green Bay has ruled top receiver Jordy Nelson out of Sunday’s NFC divisional playoff game.

His ribs injury -- reportedly at least two fractured ribs -- prevents him from playing, the team announced Friday and confirmed in its injury report.

The bad news for the Cowboys is that Nelson left last Sunday’s NFC wild-card game against the New York Giants in the second quarter. And after gaining only seven total yards and scoring zero points through the first quarter, Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers and his other receivers -- principally Randall Cobb -- still strafed the Giants’ touted secondary for 400 yards and 38 points over the final three, mostly without Nelson.

Two other Packers are ruled out, neither a surprise, both with lingering injuries: running back James Starks (concussion) and backup offensive linemen J.C. Tretter (knee). Receiver Jeff Janis (quad) and cornerback Quinten Rollins (neck/concussion) are questionable.

No Cowboys have been ruled out. Seven are questionable. Remember, the NFL eliminated the “probable” designation this season. Most players listed as questionable wind up playing.

PLAYFUL DEZ PLAYS REPORTER

FRISCO, Texas -- As reporters scrummed Dallas linebacker Sean Lee on Friday, another arm with an iPhone extended overtop reporters’ heads.

The arm belonged to Dez Bryant, the Cowboys emotional, flamboyant wide receiver.

Bryant was in a playful mood in a particularly loose Friday locker room, two days before the team’s first playoff game in two years

Sunday’s homefield faceoff against the Green Bay Packers will be Lee’s first career playoff game, having missed every previous Dallas post-season contest in his six-year career because of injuries.

Bryant maybe thought Lee was getting too serious with some of his answers, in so loose an environment. So he joined in the scrum and got Lee to stumble on his words and laugh when he realized whose arm it was.

“Well you have to pressure, you have to ... I can’t even keep a straight face,” Lee said, in trying to answer a question about how you can try to unsettle the Packers’ great quarterback Aaron Rodgers.

Everyone laughed.

Bryant then asked, “Hey Sean, I know you’ve been asked this question more than one time, but how has the defence prepared this week?”

Lee: “Oh, we’ve had some good looks from Dez Bryant. The defence is ready to go, Dez. You know that.”

Bryant: “That’s what I’m talking about. That’s all I have.”

JoKryk@postmedia.com

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