Nate Oats claims blame for loss to Tennessee

Alabama head coach Nate Oats claimed the blame for the Crimson Tide’s loss to Tennessee Saturday, a matchup of top six teams in college basketball.

In a stretch of three straight games against top five opponents, Alabama fell short on a buzzer beater. Oats wanted all criticism directed towards him afterwards though.

“We didn’t do a great job closing it,” Oats said postgame. “I’m gonna take most of the blame for the last 30 seconds. It’s on me. I subbed our bigs out to get the rebound before I should have. I shouldn’t have subbed them out until after we secured the rebound. So that was on me. And then I had a chance to call a timeout – coaches can call timeouts on the in-bounds play – and at four, I should have called it. I thought we were getting it in, and that’s on me.”

Oats maintained the end of game situations should’ve been better. If they had been, perhaps Alabama could’ve escaped Knoxville with a victory.

“And we probably could have had better guys in, been a little smaller with 3.8 on the clock to make sure they didn’t get the ball up the floor,” Oats said. “We work on end-of-game situations in practice and expect our players to be good at them, and I was not good for the last 30 seconds today. I feel like I failed these guys. For 39 and a half minutes, they out-played them. They were up four.”

Nat Oats takes blame for Alabama loss to Tennessee

There were some dicey calls in the loss, as alluded to by Oats, but in the end, you have to keep playing.

“Tough call on Grant’s verticality play there at the end, but it’s the game of basketball,” Oats said. “A lot of tough calls in the game. The worst-case scenario is they make a free throw and we still have the ball with 30 seconds to go up one. And I should have left the guys in to make sure that we secured it before we got to the offensive end. And we foul, give them the rebound at the free-throw line. They made 2-for-2, which you’ve gotta give them credit.

“We’ve gotta do a better job making our free throws. They shoot 73% percent, and we shoot 65%. We shot 50% at the rim, 65% at the line. It’s hard to win big games like this. But we were still up four with 30 seconds to go and too many coaching mistakes in the last 30 seconds.”