Alabama must improve in 'special situations' after Tennessee loss, Oats says

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Alabama played well for the majority of the game against No. 5 Tennessee on Saturday night, but made some key mistakes in moments when it mattered the most.

The most glaring example of this is the end of the game. Alabama led the Vols by four points with 30 seconds to go, and lost the game by three. That 7-0 run by Tennessee in those final 30 seconds included a heap of miscues, such as giving up an and-1, committing a loose ball foul on a missed free throw, committing a 5-second violation on the final offensive possession, and giving up the game-winning 3-pointer.

Eliminate just one of those miscues, and Alabama more than likely wins the game. But that’s not how it shook out.

“Moving forward, we’ve gotta really lock on end-of-half and end-of-games, special situations,” Alabama head coach Nate Oats said. “I’ve gotta be much better for this team on that. We’ve gotta be better.”

Oats owned up to a multitude of coaching errors he made in that final minute, but there were plenty of execution errors made by the players as well. At the end of the first half, Alabama had the chance to take the last shot and go into halftime with a 7- or 8-point lead. Instead, Mark Sears shot it with seven seconds still on the clock, and the team let Tennessee go coast-to-coast for an and-1 to end the half, needlessly cutting the lead from seven to four.

Those end-of-half and end-of-game situations are the ‘special situations’ Oats referred to, an area that he wants to work with this team to refine before more inevitably come throughout the month of March.

“We played the No. 1 defense in the country. We were up four with 30 seconds. This will probably make us pay a little closer attention to our end-of-game,” Oats said. “Our end-of-half situation wasn’t great either. We should have taken the last shot, gave them too much time, came down, gave them an and-1. So they were +1 in that scenario. If we’d have waited to go a little later, maybe we go +2 in that scenario.”

Another area that showed its need for vast improvement was Alabama’s ability to execute on baseline out-of-bounds plays. The team has had some trouble executing in that situation at times throughout the year, but none worse than being called for a 5-second violation with three seconds left and the game on the line.

Oats said he’s considering a change in when he installs that aspect of their game preparation moving forward.

“We probably need to get our under out-of-bounds package together earlier in the week instead of giving it to them the day before so we can focus on some other stuff,” Oats said. “And (Tennessee’s) good. I mean, they’re physical. They make it hard to get it in. But that’s terrible to have the amount of turnovers we did on underneath out-of-bounds. We had the one over there, we tried to get it to Mo (Dioubate). Some of that’s on me, too, to be honest with you. I’ve gotta do a better job for these guys.”

Despite the loss, Oats still thought there were plenty of positives to take away, especially if they can build on them by improving their execution in special situations.

“I think we just pump how great we played during the course of the game and focus in on some controllables like end-of-game situation stuff that we didn’t do a very good job on,” Oats said.

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