Nate Oats explains why Alabama has had up-and-down season

Alabama head coach Nate Oats feels like his team “wasted an opportunity,” on the road against No. 4 Kentucky Saturday afternoon. A hot shooting start quickly turned into a defensive meltdown thanks to Kellan Grady’s 25-point, seven-3-pointer performance, which ultimately gave Kentucky the 90-81 win.

“It’s very frustrating to watch,” Oats said after the loss in Lexington. “It’s not a recipe to win on a consistent basis. And that’s why I think we’ve seen the ups and downs we’ve had this year.”

Sitting at 17-10 on the year, Oats hasn’t been shy to give constructive criticism to his players publicly. He’s said before if he didn’t feel that his players were giving their all, there was a spot on the bench with their name on it.

“It’s disappointing to lose games when I feel like our effort wasn’t where it needed to be to win a road game,” Oats said. “Guys got to figure out how hard they need to play to win these road games, because we’ve got two more road games left. We need to win them. We got figure out how to play a lot better on the road.”

Alabama stretched its lead by as much as 13 points in the first half before Kentucky mounted a 19-5 run to end the first half with a 47-46 lead. Once out of the locker room, Kentucky went on a 24-12 run to essentially end the Crimson Tide’s hopes of a comeback with just under 12 minutes remaining.

Despite the poor performance defensively, Alabama can at least hang their hats on the fact that they had the No. 4 team in the country, and No. 6 team overall in the initial early March Madness seedings with their backs against the wall early. Keon Ellis led the charge with a season-high 28 points on 7-11 shooting beyond the arc (10-16 overall) while playing 37 minutes for Oats and the Crimson Tide Saturday.

Take into account that Kentucky was missing both of their primary ball handlers in TyTy Washington and Sahvir Wheeler and only turned the ball over seven times all afternoon on top of Kentucky’s second half run that stretched the game beyond reach for the ‘Tide.

“Some of it’s your own personal pride, too. We are losing some games — and I’m not necessarily saying today, they’ve got really good players here at Kentucky, it’s Kentucky — but we’ve lost games to teams with lesser players than us because they played harder with us,” Oats said. “To me, there’s a personal pride factor that goes into if I’m going to work as hard in this game as I have in the past 10 or 15 years — some of these guys, this is what they’ve done their whole life — how am I going to get myself to the point where I’m more skilled than the guy I’m going across from? But he needs to be, because he plays harder than me.”

Alabama remains No. 22 in NET despite Saturday’s loss at Kentucky. The Crimson Tide have stayed between No. 18 and No. 25 in NET every single day since mid-December.