Nate Oats provides health update on multiple Alabama injuries

Alabama head basketball coach Nate Oats enters his fifth year as the Crimson Tide head man fresh off of his best season on the job. Oats led Alabama to a 31-win season, an SEC regular season and tournament title win, and a Sweet 16 appearance in the NCAA Tournament for the second time during his tenure in Tuscaloosa, and will look to continue building on that this season.

In order to do so the Crimson Tide must be healthy, and at SEC Media Days on Wednesday, Oats gave an update regarding the health of his players ahead of the season.

“We’ve definitely gotta get healthy,” Oats admitted. “We had both Muhammads, [Mohamed] Wague and [Mouhamed] Dioubate, both required procedures once they got to campus with previous injuries that we weren’t aware of.”

Dioubate and Wague joined the team this offseason, Dioubate as a freshman from Flushing, New York where he was a four-star prospect ranked the No. 101 player in the 2023 class according to On3’s Industry Ranking and Wague as a transfer from West Virginia.

“So Dioubate’s been able to participate in some live things in practice, he’s still not going up and down, live scrimmage, but he’s close. He had a knee issue,” Oats said. “Wague had an issue with his foot, he’s still not doing anything live. But the both of them are on pace to be able to play in game one. So both of them, the time frame was to get them healthy just in time for game one, you’d think they’d both be there for game one.”

It will be interesting to see what impact Dioubate has as a freshman and Wague as a veteran at his third school, as both are projected to be ready to go for the Crimson Tide’s opener against Morehead State.

But outside of those two players, Alabama has remained fairly healthy this offseason outside of some nicks and bruises according to Oats.

“Everybody else we should have by game one, everything else is just minor,” Oats said. “An ankle tweak, groin pull, hip flexor, I can’t go through it, we’ve had a lot of different just minor injuries. Everybody’s not gonna be available for our closed scrimmage and our exhibition game, we do think everybody should be available by game one though.”

The Crimson Tide have a charity exhibition game on the road versus Wake Forest on October 29, which will give fans a first look at this year’s team against different competition as they continue to strive towards improvement and positive health ahead of the season.