Nate Oats considers how to fix Alabama defense

Alabama and Kentucky boast two of the three highest-scoring offenses in the nation, but when they faced off on Saturday, the Wildcats had the upper hand — defeating the Crimson Tide 117-95 in Lexington.

117 points is the most that Alabama has given up this season, but after the game, head coach Nate Oats was even more shocked and disappointed by how many points per possession his team gave up on Saturday.

“There’s no perfect offense, we gave up a 1.46 tonight,” Oats said regarding points per possesion. “Best offense in the country, I don’t know if there’s many games in the country where somebody scored better than a 1.46.”

Oats was right, with quite literally no other team in the country scoring more points per possession on Saturday than the Wildcats. As he elaborated on what went wrong on the defensive end for the floor for Alabama and what went right for John Calipari‘s Kentucky squad.

“Kentucky’s a good offensive team, they were top-10 coming into the game. We know Cal’s done a really good job kind of fixing the shooting issues he’s had in the past. He recruited some shooters, they’ve got some shooters and he had some other guys today,” Oats explained.

“Justin Edwards goes 4-of-4 [from the three-point line] and he hadn’t been shooting it all that great. We let [Rob] Dillingham, [Reed] Sheppard, and [Antonio] Reeves all shoot over 50% too,” Oats added. “So, he’s done a good job getting the roster fixed to where they’ve got good shooting, they space the floor out. Obviously, they’re better on offense.”

Kentucky couldn’t miss on Saturday, making 63.1% of their shots from the field including 13 of their 24 attempts from behind the arc. With Alabama also hurting themselves offensively with 16 turnovers the Wildcats were able to turn into a whopping 29 points.

The Crimson Tide may have the nation’s top-scoring offense, but they have the SEC’s worst-scoring defense. Which their head coach knows needs to improve in order to reach the championship heights they’d like to achieve this season.

“But if the defense isn’t fixable, we’re not going to be able to win any big games,” Oats admitted. “So, I don’t know that it’s fixable to the point where we get to where we were last year, we were third in the country, that’s past the point of doing that.”

“But, maybe we can hold somebody to a 1.1 or a 1.2 instead of a 1.46 and hopefully our offense can is a 1.2 or a 1.3,” Oats said referring to points per possession again. “Which that puts a lot of pressure on your offense every night out, but our offense has been pretty good. Even if you take away the 16 turnovers it wasn’t a total disaster … I think there’s parts of it fixable, some of it, I don’t know.”

Alabama has four regular season games remaining to improve its defense in any way possible before the postseason begins. And with two of those opponents being ranked teams, there’s no question that the defensive sense of urgency should be at a premium for the Crimson Tide.