Nate Oats describes the biggest keys to Alabama's offensive success vs. Mississippi State

Alabama put 99 more points on the board in their latest win this weekend over Mississippi State. However, while some of the offensive success was still per usual, the Crimson Tide did it on Saturday in some different, grittier ways.

Nate Oats assessed his team’s offensive output following the 99-67 win over the Bulldogs on Saturday. While the initial question was based on less success from three-point range, Oats started by noting that making 15 of them is still great although the percentage off of 48 attempts (31.3%) didn’t necessarily look all that good.

“I mean we made 15 but we took a lot. We didn’t shoot a high percentage,” Oats explained. “15 is still a lot to make but we didn’t shoot a high percentage.”

From there, Oats then dove into some of the other aspects that helped ‘Bama to nearly break 100 again in the 32-point win. First up was the 27 points that they scored off of the 18 turnovers by Mississippi State. It was a credit to the defense that they played as they generated extra opportunities for their offense to take advantage of.

“Our points off turnovers were a lot bigger than they’ve been for most of the year. I thought we played harder on (defense), forced more turnovers,” Oats said. “We’re trying to do that. We don’t have the rim protector that we had last year. So we’ve got to do things a little differently on defense. We’ve been trying to get more aggressive – force more turnovers, score off their turnovers.

“We scored 27 (off turnovers). I don’t know if that’s a season-high off points off turnovers. But my guess would be it probably would be,” Oats said. “I thought that’s where some of it came from.”

On top of that, Alabama earned even more possessions with 20 of their 48 total rebounds coming off the offensive glass. That led to even more of a disparity in possessions and attempts that helped the Tide almost hit triple digits for what would’ve just added on to their program record.

“The offensive rebounds? We had 20 on the boards. We shot 83 field goals. They only shot 55. Part of that is they lived at the free-throw line. But we did get almost 30 more field goals than them,” explained Oats. “So, if you get 30 more, you don’t have to shoot a real high percentage to almost score 100.”

“83 field goals is a lot of field goals,” said Oats.

Seeing 99 points out of Alabama isn’t all that surprising, especially with that we’ve come to expect from them in Oats’ tenure. It’s how they reached that number this time, though, that was of significance considering what it said about the fight on both ends from the current top team in the SEC.

“Turnovers, offensive rebounds – both of those things are measured off effort,” said Oats. “I thought our effort was pretty good tonight.