Nate Oats on Auburn loss: ‘They’re the No. 1 team in the country for a reason’

Going into the game between the Alabama Crimson Tide and Auburn Tigers, the two teams seemed to be battling for the reputation of being the best team in the country. Crimson Tide head coach Nate Oats even said that they’d see Saturday who the best team in the country is this season.

Following the game, Oats was ready to admit that Auburn is the best team in the country after they beat Alabama.

“Obviously, it’s a disappointing loss,” Nate Oats said. “Give Auburn a lot of credit. They’re the No. 1 team in the country for a reason. They did a great job, I thought, on their defensive end, trying to take away our threes. We didn’t shoot it very well, but they contested them.”

Alabama got off to a slow start offensively, only scoring 33 points in the first half to go down by nine points at the half. At one point, Auburn would stretch that lead to 15 points. That was, largely, on the back of making 12 three-point shots compared to just five made by Alabama.

“They did a good job contesting our shots at the rim, too. We had them for seven blocked shots, our stats. We didn’t make great rim reads, but they got us off the 3-point line, pushed us in, and made big plays at the rim — we shot under 50 percent at the rim. Can’t do that. We didn’t convert at the free-throw line as well as their guards did. You look at their guards, they were 19-of-21 at the line. We only had two guys that were forwards go 100 percent at the line. So, between our free throws, not finishing at the rim, and not getting as many threes off of them and then not making anywhere close to the level that they made them at, that ends up being the difference,” Oats said.

“Because I thought we played pretty hard. We didn’t turn the ball over a whole lot. Our turnovers were down. It was seven. We out-rebounded them by nine. We had 14 O-boards to their seven. But it’s other stuff. We stressed the turnovers, the rebounds, but we also wanted to get their shooters off the line. You go down the list, too many guys got threes off that weren’t supposed to be getting easy ones off, and they go 12-of-30 from three. They out-scored us by 21 points from three, and that’s just too many with the plan that we were trying to execute on our defensive end. They’re a good team, both sides of the ball. We’ve gotta get better.”

With the loss, Alabama fell out of a tie for first place in the SEC with Auburn. They’re now in second and if they want to make a run, it’s going to need to start right away.

“I told our guys afterwards, when we got beat at home by Tennessee last year and on GameDay, I thought we had a major letdown. The leadership on the team didn’t rally us together enough to be ready to go on the road and play well at Florida. We got trounced pretty good on the road. We’ve got to have better leadership this year. We’re not in full control of our own destiny to win outright. We are in full control of our own destiny to at least get a tie with the league moving forward, because Auburn’s now a game ahead of us,” Oats said. “And we got Auburn at their place. So, we’ll see what type of maturity and leadership we have by how we come in on Monday. We’ll be off tomorrow. We’ll come in on Monday and be ready to go.”

Things won’t get easier from here, though, and Nate Oats knows his team needs to focus. On Wednesday, Alabama will travel to Missouri for a tough road test. It begins a difficult final stretch. Every single team Alabama plays through the end of the regular season is currently ranked in the AP Top 25 Poll, including a rematch with Auburn.

“We’ll put the scouting report together for Missouri, and then we’ve got to play. It’s not an easy stretch. The last seven games, I think, is probably the hardest seven-game stretch of anybody in the country at any point. And we, obviously, didn’t plan on starting it out with the loss, but we did. So, we got three home games, three road games left in the last six games of the year,” Oats said. “And we gotta bring it. So, our mindsets got to be better than they were last year, after the home loss, after GameDay was here. That’s how I challenged our guys after the game.”

Alabama finished the loss to Auburn with just eight assists, which Nate Oats pointed to as a key reason why they struggled offensively at times. Those were struggles that Auburn didn’t have in the game.

“And we got plenty of stuff we can clean up on, starting with our ball movement. Part of the reason you shoot 48 percent at the rim is you don’t move the ball. We get seven shots blocked, and we only had eight assists. It’s a season-low by far. The other time we were low was Ole Miss. We had 11 assists. Had a little bit of similar issues where the ball didn’t move, too much iso. At least we didn’t turn it over 20 times this game, but it was just too many bad shots. We didn’t get enough shots on offense, and defensively, we gave them too many threes,” Oats said.

“They’ve got guys that make tough threes. We told our guys, don’t look at the bench after they make a tough three. That’s what they do. So, we can’t let them get off. Shoot, I think, was it [Denver] Jones that hit the banked three in. [Chad] Baker-Mazara had a couple step-backs. Well, don’t let them get them off, so they’re not looking at us when they hit some tough threes. So, we need to do a little bit better job executing the game plan. We need to do a better job putting together a little bit better game plan as coaches next time we play them.”

Ultimately, Auburn was able to walk away with a 94-85 win over Alabama. It’s one of two meetings between the two sides, but for the time being, it established the Tigers atop of college basketball this season.

“But they’re a good team. We know that. They’ve proven to be the No. 1 team in the country. We were not today,” Oats said. “But we move on. We’ve got six games left before the SEC Tournament. We need to be great in all six.”