The No. 1 spot in the Associated Press top 25 poll has been fraught with peril recently. Alabama football was first to lose it with a loss, when it fell to Vanderbilt in Week 6, after it captured the top spot by beating Georgia the prior week.

Since then, Texas has also lost, causing Oregon to jump to the top this week. On Friday, during his weekly appearance on ESPN’s Pat McAfee Show, former Crimson Tide head coach Nick Saban was asked if a team might change its approach when it takes over the No. 1 spot.

“I think there is something to that,” Saban said. “I think that’s why you see a little difficulty in people staying at number one for very long. I think people get complacent pretty easily.

“If you went into a room and you had a whole team full of guys and you said, ‘Who wants to be number four?’ Nobody would raise their hand. If you said ‘Who wants to be number one?’ Everybody’s raising their hand. So once you get there, there’s an automatic psychological, I call it relief syndrome, that I should be able to rest on my laurels. But as soon as you rest on your laurels, you really became the team everybody wanted to beat, so now its even more competitive.”

Oregon earned the top spot by beating No. 2 Ohio State in Eugene on Oct. 12, faces Illinois this week. Ducks head coach Dan Lanning smiled, but was blunt when asked what it meant to take the top spot.

“Who cares?” Lanning said this week.

Saban said the No. 1 spot can create “external factors” for players, suddenly under a brighter spotlight. He spoke of his approach to coaching at Alabama, a frequent holder of the top position throughout his tenure.

“It doesn’t matter to be number one until you’re number one at the end,” Saban said. “You have to keep focused on what you need to do to continue to improve to play better. I always tried to get guys to play to a standard. In other words, I never talked about winning, I never talked about winning the SEC, I never talked about winning the national championship.

“I said, this is the standard that we want to play to. If we can play to this standard, then we’ll beat the teams we’re supposed to beat and we’ll put ourselves in a position to have a chance to play for a championship. But you’ve gotta play to the standard first, and you gotta do it one play at a time, every play in the game, no matter who you’re playing. It doesn’t matter. You cannot let external factors affect your psychological disposition to compete.”