Nate Oats on outside noise for Alabama: 'The more you eat the poison, you're gonna die'

Alabama basketball head coach Nate Oats learned early on from former Crimson Tide football coach Nick Saban to watch out for “rat poison.” With higher expectations than ever surrounding his program, Oats is being especially cautious in monitoring his team’s ego.

“Good thing is, we’ve got coach Saban still on campus,” Oats said Thursday. “They had a lot of noise around that program for a long time and it seems like he did an unbelievable job getting his guys to focus in without it, so we may have him come speak to the team at some point.

“He had the best term for it, I think he called it rat poison. The more you listen to it, the more you eat the poison, you’re gonna die. You want to listen to all the people tell us how great we are and you start believing it, we’re gonna kill our competitive fire, we’re gonna walk into games thinking we deserve to win instead of actually earning the right to win the game.”

Expectations are through the roof for Alabama’s 2024-25 season. This past March, Oats led the program to its first appearance in a Final Four. The Crimson Tide ultimately finished the season with a 25-12 record after falling to the UConn Huskies, who went on to win the national title.

Experts around the country believe Alabama could be competing for a national championship again this season. The team returned five players from last season, including All-American guard Mark Sears.

Additionally, the Crimson Tide reeled in four players via the transfer portal. Guard Chris Youngblood headlines the transfer class. He was the American Athletic Conference Co-Player of the Year this past season at South Florida.

To pile on, Alabama boasted the No. 3 class in the 2024 recruiting cycle, according to the On3 Industry Ranking. Despite Alabama’s obvious talent, Nate Oats wants to keep his team’s nose to the grindstone.

“We need to practice like we’re the underdog,” Oats said. “Like we got a chip on our shoulder, with the confidence, knowing we’re the better team going in. And if we take care of business, play hard, move the ball, take care of the ball like that, the outcome will take care of itself, and just worry about the process of being the hardest-playing team on the floor every night.

“If you do that and eliminate the outside noise, things will take care of themselves. But if you start to believe everybody telling you how great you are and you don’t put the work in, then you’re going to take a step backward and take a loss that we shouldn’t take.”