World Series winning pitcher Curt Schilling gives Tennessee baseball some good advice.

LINK

quote:

---

“When you act the way you act on the field, and you give every team in the country extra incentive to kick your arse, you generally don’t go all the way. That’s the way it works. The game’s hard enough,” Schilling said. “Acting like you’ve hit the biggest home run in the history of college baseball, every single time, it’s going to make people beat you. You guys should be going to College World Series. But when you give somebody else extra incentive to kick your arse, it generally tends to burn you — and you already are ranked No. 1. So you have everybody coming in to give you their best game. Now you’re going to give them an extra reason to beat you. It’s going to happen, guys. But just remember. Good luck next year, make it work.”

---

I had not thought about this angle before. If you are really good, that fact alone should be in your opponents' mind and therefore give you some advantage. If you replace that doubt/fear with intensity to beat you because of your classless behavior, you have actually done yourself a disfavor. Really good teams want to demoralize you and beat you, not piss you off and fire you up.