Nate Oats told Alabama in second half that 'We are going to win this game

Georgia blitzed Alabama in the first half and were up for a decent amount of the second half last night inside Stegeman Coliseum. However, over the final stretch of the game, the Crimson Tide stormed back in a way that Nate Oats was certain that they would.

Oats spoke about the 16-point comeback by his team in Athens following the 85-76 victory over the Bulldogs. He recalled a timeout around the halfway point in the second half where he told his team exactly what he thought they were going to do in order to win the game.

“There was a timeout with 10 minutes and some change to go. Somebody in the huddle was saying, ‘We can win this game!’ and I said, ‘No, stop. We are going to win this game'” stated Oats. “There’s no ‘we can’. We’re winning this game and here’s how we’re going to do it.”

Oats then laid out how Alabama got it done over the last minutes of the game. It started on defense by holding Georgia to just nine points over a seven and a half minute stretch. That included better work on the boards and continuing to force turnovers from the Bulldogs.

Add in their own offensive scores and it was a recipe for success from the Tide in the end.

“We’ve got to get stops, we’ve got to rebound the ball better,” Oats said. “At one point, we were dow 31-9 on the boards. From that point, we were 17-8 on the glass. They didn’t score a field goal from that timeout at 10:08 until four and half minutes to go in the game.”

“So we came out of the timeout, got stops, rebounded it, did enough on offense. I thought we played hard enough,” added Oats. “Turned them over 19 times to counteract the fact that we did not rebound the ball very well at all. The field-goal percentage in the second half was a lot better. But we were playing off some turnovers and getting out in transition like we like to do.”

Alabama erupted with 58 points to win the second half by 23 by shooting 62.5% from the field. Most of that came over the last dozen minutes as they closed the game on a 43-21 run.

It ended up being the defensive end, though, that saved the Tides’ skins. They won the glass by six, won the turnovers by five, and didn’t allow another three over the final 20 minutes of the game.

After jumping back into the Top-25, it certainly looked as though Alabama was going to slip up by facing a large deficit against the ‘Dawgs. Instead, they rallied in significant fashion in order to secure another conference win that has them in first place in the league as we get to February.

“We got a lot of guys that I thought played hard,” Oats said.

“It’s a big win if you’re going to try to win the conference,” said Oats. “These are games that you’ve got to win on the road.”