Everything Nate Oats said after Alabama's 103-87 win over Vanderbilt

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – No. 4 Alabama defeated Vanderbilt, 103-87, Tuesday night at Coleman Coliseum. After the Crimson Tide’s sixth game of 100 or more points this year, head coach Nate Oats spoke to local reporters. Here is everything Oats said following the victory.

Oats’ opening statement…

“Solid win over an improved Vanderbilt team. I thought our defense in the first half was pretty good. I thought it completely fell in the second half, which is a little bit disappointing. For a team that’s trying to go after a championship, we gotta lot better than that in the second half, to give up 56 points. You got to give Vandy a lot of credit. They hung in there, kept fighting, got good shots off. Shoot, Nickel his all of his threes in the second half. So we got to figure out our defense. It’s not where we need to be. Offensively, we did enough. Didn’t shoot free throws as well as we’d have liked, either. 

“But huge game from Mo D again. I guess there’s only been five players since I’ve been here to get 20 points and 10 rebounds in a game. So he put himself in pretty elite company in the last six years with some pretty good players that have been here. So I think Mo plays hard all the time. As evidence, he’s led the team in +/- the last two games, +21 against Kentucky, +26 tonight in his 23 minutes. You kind of know what you’re going to get out of Mo. He’s going to play hard. He’s going to be tough. He’s going to be physical. I mean, he was our best matchup on their point guard. He sits down, he moves. I mean, they’ve got some guys that can score it, and I thought Edwards ended up having 21, but Dioubate did a pretty good job on him. Some of our other guys are gonna have to pick up their defense for this team to be the level we want it to be at. 

“We’re off tomorrow. We play Saturday. We come back on Thursday. Some guys are gonna have to decide how good they want to be, how much effort they want to give on the defensive end, because the effort we got in the second half is not gonna win us any championships this year.

“But solid win. Some guys played well. We got a lot of scoring off the bench. I think the most we’ve had all year. I thought Holloway was good. Holloway was +21 when he was in the game. Now, if you look at off our bench, to be honest with you, like Dioubate, +26; Holloway, +21; Youngblood, +17; Aiden Sherrell, +12. Those were the only guys to have double-digit positive +/-. Our starters didn’t get us off to a good start to start the game and didn’t get us off to a very good start to start the second half, either. So we got to get some better leadership in the starting group to get us better starts to both halves moving forward. 

“But I’m really happy for Dioubate. Really, all four of those guys off the bench. Dioubate and Holloway played great. I thought Aiden Sherrell gave us really good minutes. Guarded well, got to the offensive boards. Him and Dioubate were the only guys that had multiple offensive rebounds. So good effort from those two. And I thought Holloway played extremely hard and played well, as well.”

Oats on Mark Sears’ offensive consistency in reaching 2,500 career points…

“He’s been as consistent a guy as I’ve probably ever coached. Pretty much every game, no matter how it starts, he ends up with 20 somehow. He did it again tonight, he ends up with 21. When you’re scoring about 20 every night out and you get as many games as he’s played … that puts him in some pretty good company. Congrats to Mark. I thought he picked it up offensively for us during the second half. Put the ball in his hands late when they got close. … Once they got it cut to eight, I thought Sears, from there, took over a lot. We put it in his hands, kind of set the high-ball screen for him. He got downhill, made some good reads, had some assists, some buckets. He’s a guy you can really trust on the offensive end to make sure we get good points.”

Oats on how he would assess Alabama’s response to his maturity test…

“A C, since I’m a teacher. You give it an A- in the first half and then they failed the second half. So average out a failing grade and an A- and you call it a C, I guess. First semester and second semester. We didn’t give a final exam. It’s first quarter, second quarter, whatever you wanna. I was disgusted with the second-half defense, to be honest with you. But I thought we came out of the game with a way better attitude, playing hard. I think we held to a 0.82 in the first half, and then it jumped up to a 1.3 in the second half. So a 0.82 against a team like this is pretty good. So for the first 20 minutes, I thought it was great. And I think it was a 1.3 in the second half, and that’s terrible.”

Oats on where is Aden Holloway’s confidence with his shot right now…

“Pretty high. I think if you look at the SEC, go to the website, up until last game, he was No. 1 in the conference in field goal percentage. I think there’s a minimum, he had to make at least five field goals made per game. So I hope this gets him back up over that. I don’t know if this puts him back at No. 1 again. But I mean, he’s shooting the ball extremely well. He’s hitting that floater in the lane. He’s making his threes. 

“It’s extremely hard for a guard to lead a league this good in field goal percentage. So it kind of shows you his skill level, what he’s capable of. I never want him to pass up an open three. I really don’t care how deep it is. It could be 26, 28 feet. I think it’s going in every time. Those floaters he shoots in the lane, he’s been really good with those, and he’s got a pretty good finishing package at the rim. So his confidence is high. But I think part of it is he plays hard. I think his effort on defense has been really good. You saw him strip the big he got switched on to – who was it, Carey, I believe. The one play where he got stripped him there in the middle of the paint. At the half, he was leading our guards with six blue-collar points. Grant had 10. He was leading all the guards for the game. I think he ended up having 11, which is pretty good. I mean, Mo D won with 17. And Holloway, it’s a little harder for guards to get them sometimes at 11. So double digits. We only had three guys, I think. Him, Grant, Aiden Sherrell and Mo D in double digits for blue collar. 

“So he’s playing really hard. I think when you play really hard and give an effort like that and you get the skill that you put a lot of time into your skill level, I think things go your way. I think things are going his way right now, and I’m super happy for him.”

Oats on what has changed the most about Holloway’s game…

“I definitely don’t think it’s anything in his mechanics. When he came here, he was shooting as well as anybody I’ve seen. I mean, if you watch him and Sears, the two of them always come in and shoot together. Preston’s in here with them. It’s a real shooting contest. I mean, they go back and forth. Sears shoots it as well as Holloway. Some days, Sears is better than him. But it seems like teams are a little more loaded up on Sears. Holloway’s kind of like a second option when he’s in there. So he’s been able to get a little more free. But the mechanics have been great all the time. I do think he needed to get his confidence up. 

“He needed to get comfortable in our system. How aggressive do I want him to be? I mean, I can’t get him aggressive enough, to be honest with you. What kind of threes do I want him to take? I want to take every single one that’s open. I just think he had to realize, like, what – I think that game where he had 19 threes, what was that South Dakota State maybe, I told him he really should have taken 22 because he passed up three I wish he would have taken. I think his reply to me was, ‘Say no more.’ So from then, get them up. Like, as many as you can get up because he’s not missing many.”

Oats on giving Mo Dioubate more leeway to go score…

“To me, he’s always had it. It’s just he needed to learn how to do it with the correct spacing when the opportunities are there because you can’t put your head down and just drive into crowds and expect anything good to happen. But we came in, I think, three weeks ago, he was killing everybody in practice one day about three weeks ago, and nobody could guard him. I mean, maybe Youngblood was the best option. He was too quick for our bigs, way too strong for our guards. Youngblood’s strong, but even he struggled a little bit. So I came in the next day with about six new plays. Said, ‘If you’re gonna play like this, like we’re gonna have a little –’ and Bauman, him and Ryan together on offense, Bauman more like keeps the plays together, keeps them organized, gives me my play sheets. And on the play sheet all of a sudden the next day, like it’s in here. He named it himself, ‘the off-road package.’ So Mo D’s got the off-road package. It’s kind of like smash mouth, not typically the way we play, but it’s there, and we got it in. 

“I mean, honestly, we didn’t really call a whole lot for him, other than we got the one play in transition where he had a mismatch on him. Just give it to him. Just go beast mode, go score the ball, which he did. He’s got opportunities because people are so concerned with our guards, particularly now Sears and Holloway. This guy’s jumping out to help edge a screen and whatever, and he just keeps the ball. Shoot, he’s 8-for-9 tonight. The one he missed there late, literally, he could easily been 9-for-9. He typically makes the shot he missed tonight. So he’s making his free throws at a better clip. He’s in the gym working hard. Not that he was ever not aggressive, because he couldn’t make a free throw as well. He’s always aggressive, but I think it helps when you go to the line and make free throws. You want to get fouled because you’re going to the line, getting free points at the line. So the more he comes along offensively, we’ve known he has been great rebounding and defensive-wise, the better off we’re going to be.”

Oats on how he’s seen Alabama improve in turnovers since the Ole Miss game…

“Honestly, the 21 turnovers came because we weren’t aggressive enough in attacking Ole Miss’ coverages. Our guards were super passive coming off ball screens, put no pressure on the defense in the the pick-and-rolls. Our guards are coming downhill, putting pressure on them. When you put pressure on them, the defense collapses or you get open shots. If they collapse, the kick-outs are wide open. In the Ole Miss game, we put no pressure on them. They built out. They got steals on the build-outs because we didn’t put any pressure. To me, with some intelligence, with a high IQ, we want you playing as aggressive as you can possibly play, and that’s when we’re playing our best basketball. 

“Even tonight, I didn’t think we put enough pressure on the pick-and-roll. When we finally started to in the second half, Cliff goes set more drags in transition. Guards come off trying to score. We got Cliff on some lobs. We got some slip-outs with Mo Dioubate on some of that stuff. I think we’ve gotten our guards, and again, this is a lot of credit to Coach Pannone and Coach Bauman on the offensive side. But get more aggressive, put pressure on the defense, put pressure on the switch when they’re switching. More aggressive, more aggressive, better spacing. Keep them spaced out. So the help’s got to come from further. The ball moves, I mean there’s some really good ball movement clips tonight. And make the rotations come from a long ways away, I think it helps with the turnovers. 

“And shoot, I think we had three charges called. I think three of those turnovers were that easily could have been blocks, and all of a sudden, instead of 11 turnovers, we only have eight. So I thought live-ball turnovers, we didn’t have many. And the one I remember for sure when Dioubate turned it over there in the first half, Holloway came back and covered for him. I thought he did an unbelievable job. So trying not to let them score points off turnovers. Yeah, they had eight, and we had 17. So we doubled them up in points off turnovers, and that’s what they do best. They were leading the country coming in. So the stuff we’ve been focused on, particularly on the offensive end, we’ve done a pretty good job of.”

Oats on his conversations with Cliff Omoruyi in the second half…

“One, I wanted to make sure he was good because when he got that foul called on him when Hoggard drove, kind of got him with an elbow right in his ribs. So he was having a hard time breathing, which makes you a little worried. We got him out, and the doctor checked him out. Clarke, our trainer, and then I want to make sure he was good still. ‘Let’s make sure you’re healthy.’ So other than that, like we got to get him to the O boards more. I mean, he only had one offensive rebound. We’ve been on him to rebound. Dioubate, in a few more minutes tonight – he end up playing more because he was playing well – but he ends up with 10 rebounds, and Cliff only had three. 

“And he went the one time, pushed, got two hands in his back. We got to do it without fouling. But we also want him to get into ball screens quicker, in transition, get out with the way they were covering. And I thought we could have got him a lot more labs if he was a little bit more aggressive to get into the ball screens and then sprint out of them. So defensively, I thought he was pretty good. We need him to rebound more. We need him to play with more pace, more pressure on the rim as a roller in pick-and-rolls. That’s the big areas we’re trying to get him to improve on.”

Oats on Sears’ career, how it has been to build this program with him…

“Listen, for a kid that’s from the state of Alabama that no high majors wanted him coming out of high school, ends up going to a good mid-major program at Ohio. If you go back and actually look, I think there was games at the beginning of his career at Ohio where he didn’t play, or played very few minutes, but I’m pretty sure if you go back and look, he didn’t play his freshman year. So to have that and then to end up where he’s currently at as a National Player of the Year candidate tells you everything you need to know about his work ethic. He didn’t shoot particularly well his freshman year at Ohio, even though once he got in the rotation, he played pretty well. But he didn’t shoot it well. So between his freshman and sophomore year, he essentially locked himself in the gym and turned himself into a shooter. He’s now one of the best shooters in the country, and that’s through all the hard work. 

“So I’m gonna be talking about him for years down the road about what guys are capable of if they’re willing to work hard, put the time in and really do what you need to do. I mean, it takes a lot of work to be this good. He’s gonna be in tomorrow. It’s an off day tomorrow. I guarantee he’s gonna be in getting his shooting workout in. Every day, he’s in here. He wants to go before practice. He wants to go back in the afternoon. Sometimes he comes back even again in the evening. Like for him to score 2,500 points being from here, nobody wanted him out of high school, doing what he did for his first two years at Ohio and then coming back here and then having the career. Even his first year here, I mean, we were the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament, and he was our second lead scorer. I don’t know if anybody expected him to be that good right out of the gate. I mean, Brandon Miller, the second overall pick in the draft, been killing it in the NBA the last two years was the leading scorer. Mark was our second-leading scorer that year.

“So he came in immediately able to score. He’s really progressed as a point guard. He had seven assists, zero turnovers tonight. So he’s had multiple games where he’s at really high assist numbers, very low turnover numbers. His growth as a point guard and making the right reads, taking care of the ball, that’s where he’s grown the most this year. And I thought his effort on defense, for the most part, this year has been significantly better. I think we need him to lead. I thought he could have been better in the second half today. But if we’re talking about his 2,500 points and his offensive game, he’s grown a lot. And I couldn’t be happier for the kid, especially from the state of Alabama, here at his own state’s school at Alabama. Congrats to Mark. I’m super happy for a kid that works that hard. I can roll with a kid with his work ethic the rest of my career. Hopefully, we keep finding guys like that.”

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