Nate Oats reveals why Alabama has avoided falling in trap games

Alabama is fairly young on the basketball court this year. Three of their four leading scorers are true freshmen, one of which is Brandon Miller, who already has flourished into one of the best players in the entire country. He’s probably a shoo-in for an All-American nomination and would be squarely in contention for the No. 1 pick if not for the existence of French gargantuan Victor Wembanyama.

Despite all this youth leading the way for the Crimson Tide, head coach Nate Oats still likes the maturity from this group, evidenced by the fact that they really haven’t dropped any games they shouldn’t. A rare feat for a young team, because most younger teams tend to lose focus and slip up against lesser opponents. Not this Tide team. Oats says they’re locked in.

So here was his statement the other day following the Ole Miss win — definitely a “trap” game if there ever was one. But the Tide pulled through, winning 84-62. Oats is proud of the maturity:

Nate Oats on Alabama’s maturity

“We’ve got a mature group, even though we’re playing a lot of freshmen. We’ve got four freshmen in the rotation strong, starting three of them. Some of them are really just playing high-level basketball for the first time. Not to say the high school level they played at wasn’t high level, but it’s not the SEC. So you’d think with guys like that that they’d pay more attention to fans and whatever and maybe look past this game to Kentucky because obviously Kentucky’s a big one Saturday. But I think they’ve done a good job, the freshmen.

“I think our upperclassmen, you look at Noah Gurley’s done a great job leading, talking to guys. Quinerly’s talked to guys. Dom Welch has been in a lot of big games. I think just having some of those guys around some of the freshmen that have been playing well helped understand that this is college basketball. Anybody can beat anybody on any given night. You see it every week in college basketball where a team that’s highly rated loses a game they probably shouldn’t have lost. I think just having some veteran guys around the young guys helps.

“But the young guys listen and the young guys are pretty mature themselves. And I think it also helps having some competition. Like we weren’t this deep last year. This year, if you’re not playing hard and not playing well, we’ve got plenty of options to get in the game and play where last year we were kind of stuck. If guys weren’t playing hard, we didn’t have many options to play. We tried to play some walk-ons to spark it a little bit. This year, we’ve got 10 guys strong in the rotation that are all playing well. We don’t have to play you if you’re not playing hard this year.”