Nate Oats chastises Alabama players for free throw struggles

Not much went right for Alabama on Tuesday against Ole Miss, leaving head coach Nate Oats quite upset during his postgame press conference. The topic of free throw shooting game up after Alabama went a decent 19-26 from the line. But four of those misses werefrom star big man Grant Nelson, dropping his season rate to under 63%.

For this game specifically, Oats admits free throws were not why Alabama lost. It’s something he can see down the road, though. Plenty of SEC games are going to be tight contests and sometimes, making free throws can be the difference between winning and losing.

“We missed seven of them but it didn’t lose us the game,” Oats said. “I’ve been telling them, ‘If we don’t fix it, it is going to lose us a game.’ If this would have been a one or two-possession game, maybe you point to that as it cost us the game.”

As a team, Alabama is attempting 27.2 free throws per game, good enough for fifth in the country. Getting to the line has not been a problem this year. Converting has.

Seeing just 69.7% of shots from the charity stripe is 248th in all of college basketball. Well below what the Crimson Tide did last year, converting at 77.2%, ranked No. 30. Losing Latrell Wrightsell to injury has certainly hurt but only four active players are over 70% at the moment.

Oats admits there might be a mental aspect to Alabama missing all these foul shots. He wants to see players in the gym every day working on it, saying there is no additional strain on the body in getting up “hundreds” of free throws.

Certainly, a big focus moving forward in Tuscaloosa.

“It’s mental with some of them for sure,” Oats said. “But here’s my thing with them. Free throws are the one thing in the game of basketball that has no variables other than the variables you put in your head. If you want to have confidence, you got to earn confidence. You can’t talk yourself into being confident… We got to spend some time on it. We had too many guys stepping up, not making their free throws, when we need them to step up and make them for us.”