Nate Oats jokes about wanting media to criticize Alabama's defense more

Nate Oats is hoping the media will help him motivate his team. On Wednesday, the Alabama head coach jokingly requested for members of the press to criticize his team’s defense more this week to light a fire under them ahead of their showdown against 6-seed BYU on Thursday in the Sweet Sixteen.

“I’d appreciate it if you guys put a lot more talk out there about how our defense isn’t good enough to win this game so that we can show our guys that nobody believes in them like last year,” Oats said. “Yeah, our defense wasn’t any good last year. I think we weren’t even in the top 100 in defense.

“It was pretty easy to show our guys that our defense isn’t good enough. We struggled there at the end of the year. Finally got the guys to wake up after we lost the first round of the SEC tournament, then lost at the end of the regular season.

“I think this year our defense is significantly better. It’s still not where we’d like it to be. It’s going to have to get significantly better to make another Final Four run.”

Alabama’s defense might be better than it was last year but it still has plenty of room for improvement. The Crimson Tide are allowing 81.0 points per game, the ninth-most in the country and the most of any Power Four program.

The Crimson Tide stepped up its defense on Sunday in their 80-66 win over 7-seed St. Mary’s. Alas, BYU will a much more dangerous foe on offense. The Cougars are averaging 85.5 points per game through their two wins in the NCAA Tournament.

Even if Alabama defeats BYU on Thursday, there will be more outstanding offenses ahead. Nate Oats knows his team must reach their defensive potential quickly.

“I think a lot of who’s going to come out of here is who plays the best defense, and some of these other teams have had better defensive stretches than maybe we’ve had,” Oats said. “We’ve got to get our guys’ attention, which we have, and we’re capable of being a great defensive team, and that’s what we’re going to have to do over these next couple days if we’re going to get out of this four-team bracket here.”

Alabama and BYU are set to square off at 7:09 p.m. ET on Thursday. The game will air live on CBS. The winner will advance to the Elite Eight.