NORMAN, Okla. -- Quannas White, the Oklahoma team prankster, has a favorite gag he pulls on head coach Kelvin Sampson.

Amidst the quiet of the team bus after OU road wins, White will slyly dial Sampson's cell phone number. Players giggle when Sampson's phone rings, and White always says the same thing when his coach answers.

	Quannas White will pass on personal recognition as long as the team wins.

"How good is our team?"

Even though Sampson sees White's name on Caller ID, he laughs along.

This preseason, if White called to ask, Sampson could tell him that ESPN.com has christened OU the nation's No. 1 team.

The Sooners' chance for a return trip to the Final Four is no joke. They return four starters from a 31-5 team, but maybe more importantly they have players like White, who epitomize Sampson's selfless philosophy by knowing their roles.

"Quannas is one of the few point guards in the country that judges his play by the scoreboard," says Sampson. "A lot of guys get more recognition and publicity than Quannas, but he'll say, 'What's my record against them?'"

White pilots the nation's toughest backcourt, as he feeds OU's more celebrated guards, Hollis Price and Ebi Ere. But when White arrived on campus last summer, Sampson did a double take.

White ballooned 20 pounds to 210 since Sampson last saw him, prompting the coach to joke that he'd recruited a point guard and ended up with a pulling guard.

"He was the Jared Lorenzen of point guards," says Sampson, referencing Kentucky's 300-pound quarterback.

White labored through Sampson's Ultra Slim Fast diet of wind sprints last fall and learned his lesson. He quickly bought into the system, and by the end of the season he had emerged as one of the steadiest point guards in the Big 12.

Also, he adapted to Sampson's hard line philosophy of a team-first attitude and selfless play, which allowed the Sooners to blossom late and make their push to the Final Four. White finished the year with a 2.4 assist-to-turnover ratio, but he improved all year, upping it to 2.9 in league play and 3.3 in the NCAAs.

ESPN.com's preseason ranking and Power Index breakdowns of the top 16 teams in the country: 1. Oklahoma 2. Arizona Wildcats 3. Kansas Jayhawks 4. Pittsburgh Panthers 5. Florida Gators 6. Texas Longhorns 7. Alabama Crimson Tide 8. Duke Blue Devils 9. Michigan State Spartans 10. Xavier Musketeers 11. Oregon Ducks 12. Gonzaga Bulldogs 13. Georgia Bulldogs 14. Maryland Terrapins 15. Kentucky Wildcats 16. UCLA Bruins

"We know that Quannas could score 15 to 20 points a game," says Ere, "but he knows his role and does his job."

The searing buzz of Ere's alarm clock at 5:30 a.m. best represents how Sampson molded him as a player. Sampson says Ere needed to be pushed, so when he arrived at OU from junior college, Sampson began pushing him immediately.

Six days a week, Ere woke at dawn, as Sampson began imploring him leave his "comfort zone." Watch OU practice and a players' "comfort zone" will inevitably be questioned, as Sampson uses the refrain to push his players hardest when they ache the most.

For Ere, Sampson pushed him so far outside his comfort zone that he led Big 12 guards in rebounding last season (5.8).

This fall, he blew away the teams' other guards in conditioning.

"Mentally, I'm a whole lot tougher," Ere says. "At first, I really couldn't go hard a whole lot of possessions. He teaches us to go hard every possession, no matter how tired you are. It all comes back around to toughness."

Price, a four-year starter for Sampson, reigns as his poster boy for toughness. Price and White played together in the same high school backcourt, both escaping the demons of New Orleans' 9th Ward to reach the pinnacle of college basketball.

While emerging as one of the nation's top guards and a Wooden Award candidate, Price has become the unquestioned leader of the Sooners.

More than his 16.5 ppg is the tenacity Price showed in the 2001 NCAA Tournament when he came back from a triceps tear so severe that it required three surgeries and still necessitates attention.

Maybe the highest compliment paid to Price is that he receives glowing reviews from opposing coaches as well as his own.

"Beyond his ability and his intelligence, I think you can see his heart beating inside his jersey," says Missouri coach Quin Snyder. "Even sometimes when he's burying a 3 against you that puts you down eight at halftime, there's a certain level of spirit in which he plays the game that you have to appreciate."

Sampson cherishes Price's leadership. He credits it to setting the intense tone the Sooners carry every day in practice.

Sampson refuses to sit through a bad practice, and he'll clear the team out and make them return at 6 a.m. the next day if they're not going hard. But that hasn't happened the past two years, and Sampson credits Price's leadership for that.

	“	I know everything (coach Kelvin Sampson is) going to say before he says it. I know when he's going to kick us out of practice. I'll bring the team in and talk to them or sub myself in and do something to get him and the team fired up. ”
		— Hollis Price, Oklahoma guard

Sampson says that underachieving teams collapse because of poor player leadership. But with Price as his on-court extension, Sampson isn't too worried about that.

"I know everything he's going to say before he says it," says Price. "I know when he's going to kick us out of practice. I'll bring the team in and talk to them or sub myself in and do something to get him and the team fired up."

White, Ere, Price and the rest of the Sooners personify their coach's personality as much as any team in the country. For all his daily preaching on toughness, Sampson also practices it.

Consider that twice a year, usually around late October and early March, Sampson's chronic asthma gets so bad that he checks himself in a local hospital under an assumed name.

Sampson, 47, usually spends those nights receiving respiratory treatment and steroids.

True to his dedicated nature, Sampson always checks out for a few hours in the afternoon for practice. While there, he'll wear long sleeves to hide the device that's pumping medicine into his veins.

Few of Sampson's players even know he has asthma, as he trudges on without complaining.

"When they sneak me down to the respiratory unit and I see all those children," Sampson says, "I'd rather have it happen to me than some little kid."

It's that type of toughness, which Sampson epitomizes, that he'll need to instill in the Sooners' young players. Sampson said it's clicked in junior center Jabahri Brown, who's transformed from a kid who'd make up illnesses to miss practice into a loose-ball demon. It's slowly being ground into the Sooners' two freshmen blue chippers, power forward Kevin Bookout and guard DeAngelo Alexander, who'll be relied on heavily this season. It never found its way into the head of Kentucky transfer Rashaad Carruth, whose redshirt season didn't last past the first official day of practice.

It'll be how the complimentary players handle conference road games and the NCAA Touranment's pressure that will determine if OU has the guts for a repeat Final Four trip.

For White, that would mean a trip home to New Orleans, where a lot of folks are counting on him.

"We go down that way in December to play Mississippi State," says White, "but everyone is expecting us twice. Really, they want us to come down in March."

By then, Sampson will definitely know what to say when White gives him a call on the team bus.

Pete Thamel is a frequent contributor to ESPN Magazine and ESPN.com. He's based in Bartlesville, Okla., where he's writing a book about NAIA basketball. His e-mail is vpthamel@yahoo.com