You couldn't annoy Pete Carroll by proclaiming his team No. 1 in August.      
Some coaches will shake their fists at you for complicating one particular facet of their job, which is to tell their players during the preseason that they suck and need to get better. Carroll, on the other hand, held the door wide open for the proclamations and plaudits. He rolled out the red carpet, which is the Hollywood thing to do.
He wasn't pretending, either. USC as preseason No. 1? Fine with Carroll.
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"He loved it," said Sam Baker, a former offensive lineman and All-American for the Trojans. "It was the big stage. He wanted that. We definitely embraced it.
"There was no one better at dealing with the noise of something like No. 1 than Coach."
How many times have you read "the polls don't matter"? How many times have coaches and players tried to shrug off being No. 1 when you know they would rather walk through a graveyard at midnight than be placed at the top of the pile in college football before a game is played? Coaches loathe No. 1, because with it their players lose their sense of urgency. They might as well get "Fat" and "Happy" stitched to the back of their jerseys the way No. 1 feeds egos.
Nick Saban, the Alabama coach, said Fat and Happy were his two key players on the 2010 team, which was ranked No. 1 to start the season. Bama lost three times.
Preseason No. 1s usually do not ask to be put at the top of the menu to be devoured. Baker said Carroll sharpened the knife with No. 1.


"Coach would say, 'Guys, now that we're No. 1, we're going to get everybody's best shot,'" Baker said. "He would say, 'That's the way it should be in this game.' And then you would hear teams say, 'We're going to shock the world and beat SC,' and Coach would say to us, and we would say to each other, 'Let them bring it on.' Everybody was going after No. 1."
It figures, then, that USC is the last preseason No. 1 to win a national championship (2004). Every other preseason No. 1 this century has come up short.
So here comes defending national champion Ohio State, the unanimous No. 1 in the 2015 preseason AP poll. Somebody tell the Buckeyes there is nothing above the penthouse. There is only the elevator shaft.
You might feel uneasy for Ohio State, but its coach, Urban Meyer, has danced with preseason No. 1 before. Like Carroll, Meyer holds it close.

"He would tell us, 'This is why you come to a place like Florida,'" said Duke Lemmens, who was a defensive end on the 2008 team that won a title and the 2009 team that lost that one game to Alabama. "'Every game is a big deal.' You know why? Because the Gators were in the big game. We made it a big deal because we're No. 1.
"We built a culture here of being in the big game and playing to the moment. We enjoyed being in the limelight."
Florida was coming off of a 2008 national championship when it was ranked No. 1 to start 2009. Some teams sweat, because expectations can weigh on a team. Lemmens said Meyer prepared his team for success. He was not wary of it.
"He had the video staff create these videos of champions celebrating, like the Celtics or the Steelers," Lemmens said. "There would be clips of guys putting on the championship rings and celebrating a championship. It was great stuff.

"Bobby Knight came and spoke to us about winning championships. Billy Donovan won back-to-back national championships with the Gators [in basketball]. He talked to us about repeating."
The Gators were still No. 1 and 12-0 when they lost to Alabama 32-13 in the 2009 SEC Championship Game. They did not lose because No. 1 got inside their heads. They lost because the team on the other sideline had a Hall of Fame coach and six players who would be first-round draft picks in 2010 and 2011.
So can being No. 1 outlive its usefulness as incentive and become a distraction? Can it hurt a team? Does the team get placed on the mountaintop and stay out too late?
Here is what's key and what young athletes are being taught these days by the better sports psychologists.

"The path is the goal," said Dr. Ed Etzel, a sports psychologist at West Virginia University and Olympic gold-medal winner in shooting.
The goal is not the championship. The goal is the spirit of the journey.
"What one does with his/her moments along the way is what is essential," said Etzel, whose rifle teams at WVU won four national championships. "What are the Seahawks apparently doing [under Carroll]? Mindfulness practice. Stay in the moment, accepting the good/happy, bad/uncomfortable, boring, and be committed to the path wherever it may lead."

So what about the mountain you have been placed on, or the mountain you have climbed?
"There is no mountain," Etzel said.
"A lot of people get influenced by the media. It's a matter of how much you want to identify with it [being preseason No. 1]."
Etzel said the top of the mountain offers a nice view for a while. Then what?
"The sun goes down," he said.
There is an anonymous quote that speaks to the whole issue.
"If you take care of your now, your later on will take care of itself."
It is essential advice for a preseason No. 1.

Richard Samuel is a strength and conditioning coach in Lawrenceville/Athens, Georgia. He was a running back on the 2008 Georgia team that featured quarterback Matthew Stafford and running back Knowshon Moreno. Georgia crushed Hawaii 41-10 in the Sugar Bowl to close the 2007 season, and it had a lot of talent returning from an 11-2 team.
Yep, it was a can't-miss UGA team. Except the Bulldogs did miss. They lost 41-30 to Alabama, 49-10 to Florida and 45-42 to Georgia Tech. That Georgia team was smothered in NFL draft picks. Thirteen of those players are still playing in the NFL.

Somebody just put the wrong price tag on the package, right?
"No, we earned that preseason No. 1; it wasn't given to us," said Samuel, whose sweat shop is called Richard Samuel Performance Training. "We had a lot of talent. I thought we were going to have a great year. No. 1 was a fair accolade for that team."
So what happened?
"Sometimes, No. 1 just doesn't play well," Samuel said. "We beat ourselves in those games. Honestly, we did."
In his mind's eye, Samuel flips back to 2008 searching for those clues that revealed a team that had a little too much strut. He never saw it, he said.
"Mark Richt wasn't the kind of coach who let a team get cocky," Samuel said. "Like I said, we just beat ourselves. We didn't play well."

As he trains athletes for their shot at being No. 1, or their shot at playing college football, or just plain being a better athlete, Samuel is skilled at increasing strength and endurance and flexibility. What he also does is motivate. Strive for a seat on that pedestal, he said. When you get there prove yourself again and again.
Another lesson for No. 1.
Stuff happens in football. Big stuff and little stuff hits you from the blind side. Hiccups. A tipped pass, a wrong read, a missed tackle. All of the stuff adds up and becomes a loss—or two or three. Frank Alexander was a senior defensive end on Oklahoma's 2011 team that started the season No. 1. OU ran into the bad stuff. What happened?

Football happened.
The Sooners started 6-0, waxing Texas 55-17 and beating Kansas 47-17. Then came the hiccups, the bad stuff. OU was missing three defensive starters to injury for the Oct. 22 game against Texas Tech. Also, the game with Tech in Norman started about an hour late because of a storm.
"We went back to our nice, comfortable locker room and relaxed; it was luxury," Alexander said. "They went back to their cramped, small locker room and stayed mad."

Tech zipped out to a 31-7 lead. OU made a furious rally but fell short, 41-38.
"The better team won," Alexander said. "We were not the better team that game."
Injuries hurt the Sooners against Tech, but so did attrition. To combat overconfidence, a No. 1 needs leadership, lots of it. Alexander said his recruiting class was down to seven seniors by 2011.
"Here is the thing with Oklahoma: There is a tradition there because of a lot of winning over the years, and people expect you to be flawless," Alexander said. "It's a game of football, and you expect to win all of 'em, but you're not going to win all of 'em. You can lose for a lot of reasons, even if you have the talent to be No. 1."

In 2013, Alabama received 58 of 60 first-place votes and did not win a national championship. In 2009, Florida received 58 of 60 first-place votes and did not win a national championship.
Sam Baker is looking at No. 1 Ohio State, and he understands the Buckeyes are in the cross hairs. It's the same challenge that was in front of the Trojans in three of his four years: 2004, 2005 and 2007, the same challenge that has confronted Alabama and Florida.
"There are going to be some up-and-down teams in the Big Ten this season," Baker said. "Some of those down teams are going to say, 'Hey, we can save our season by beating Ohio State.' When you're No. 1, you know their best shot is coming."