Nick Saban understands that Alabama has a target on its back week after week, season after season, and for good reason.

One of the main storylines around college football after Week 2 was the Crimson Tide’s loss to Texas at Bryant-Denny Stadium. And for good reason: seeing the Tide suffer a loss this early in the season is a bit jarring. The other storyline concerns how they can bounce back — starting with their game at South Florida on Saturday — and avoid a dreaded 2nd loss the rest of the way that would all but extinguish their College Football Playoff hopes.

Saban, for his part, is looking for his players to be, in his words, “paranoid”.

“Paranoid people always think somebody’s after them. If you’re going to be a player at Alabama, you got to be paranoid because every team that plays us is going to try to beat us, because it makes their season. It makes their program. That’s all they talk about,” Saban said during his “Hey Coach” radio show on Thursday. “I don’t know if our players, sort of, always get that all the time. They look at the game like it’s a game. Which it is, and we want them to — I don’t mean to play ordinary, but be in an ordinary mindset of what I need to do to execute and do my job, not in some anxious way out there trying to compete and make mistakes and make poor decisions and judgments.”

Alabama will look to improve to 2-1 against the Bulls in Tampa. Kickoff Saturday is at 3:30 p.m. ET on ABC.