Nate Oats reacts to crazy stat on blowout wins by Alabama in SEC

Alabama on Saturday became the first SEC team in more than 60 years to win three conference men’s basketball games by 40 or more points. And after a 108-59 dismantling of Georgia that did it, head coach Nate Oats reflected on what that tidbit shows about his team.

Of course, it’s reflective of a talented offense — any team capable of putting up 100-plus has oodles of offensive talent. But Oats also sought to give some love to the defense for the efforts, two of which came directly after losses.

“Our defense is actually ranked ahead of our offense, right now, in all of the efficiency metrics. So, I think when you pair together defensive group with some offensive firepower, you get those games where you kind of go on fire and blow a team out. We’ve told our group from day one, us making shots should determine the margin of victory, not whether we win or lose. Like our defense needs to be good enough to carry us, even when we’re not making shots,” Oats said.

Oats has a salient point to make about the defense. Just scoring 100 points isn’t enough to win by such a big margin and Alabama would know, beating North Carolina 103-101 in a four overtime game earlier this season. In the three 40-point-plus conference wins, Alabama has held opponents to 66, 44 and now 59 points.

Those are all defensive efforts good enough to win when the offense is merely operating at a fine level. When it works like it did on Saturday night — a game that saw Alabama shooting 47.1% from 3 — you get lopsided margins.

“So I feel like when you combine an explosive offense and a team that’s really bought in to defense, you end up with a few games like this. You’re not going to shoot 47% from 3 every game out. But when you do, you give yourself a chance to kind of, blow a team out,” Oats said.