Everything Nate Oats said after Alabama's 99-94 loss to Florida

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – No. 7 Alabama lost to No. 5 Florida, 99-94, in its final home game on Wednesday night at Coleman Coliseum. After the Crimson Tide’s second straight loss, Alabama head coach Nate Oats spoke to local reporters. Below is everything Oats said.

Oats’ opening statement…

“You’ve gotta give Florida a lot of credit. They came in. They played us tough. They looked like they had more energy, to be honest with you. So I don’t know if it’s a lag from the tough loss at Tennessee, our guys are just tired. I don’t know. But to get out-rebounded by 15 – we knew they were a tough rebounding team, but we’re usually better than that we go into a game knowing we’ve got to rebound. It seemed like they beat us to about every 50-50 ball. They obviously destroyed us on the glass. In second-chance points, they had us doubled, and we gave up 26 fastbreak points, according to our stats, which is terrible. Twenty-six points in fastbreak, 19 second-chance is 45. That’s about half their points came on second-chance and transition. So we’ve gotta be better.

“It doesn’t matter what your game plan is, if you don’t get back on defense and you can’t get a rebound. We’re gonna have to figure it out before we go to Auburn. We’ve gotta to the No. 1 team in the country, we’ve gotta go to their place. It’s gonna be a tough game for us there. And we’re playing for a lot more than just – we obviously can’t win the regular-season championship. We knew that coming into this game. But we’re playing for SEC Tournament seeding, we’re playing for NCAA Tournament seeding. I thought we’d get a little bit better effort than what we got out of some of these guys tonight.”

Oats on how concerned is he about losing four of the last six…

“We knew it was going to be a tough stretch to close. I thought we’d do a little bit better. I thought we’d at least play with more effort. I’m more – not panicked we’re losing. It’s more concerning how we lost. Getting out-rebounded by 15 and just not getting the 50-50 balls. I think Florida had more pop, more energy than us. That’s concerning to me.”

Oats on how do you get back on track rebounding…

“We’re gonna have to challenge some of these guys, see if it was breakdowns. Some of the rebounds were breakdowns. Some of them, we just didn’t make guys leak it, not getting in the mix. Guys are gonna have to determine whether they want to make some tough plays or not. I didn’t think we made too many tough plays tonight.”

Oats on what Mark Sears has done for the program…

“He’s done a lot for us. Obviously, he was our leading scorer in the first and only Final Four we’ve ever played in. He’s a National Player of the Year candidate going into the year. We’ve been a top-10 team all year, and he’s been our leader. I think he’s playing really hard. He didn’t shoot it great from 3 tonight, but he’s had some pretty efficient games here over the last month and given us pretty good effort on D. For a kid from Alabama to do what he’s done these last three years here at Alabama, it would have been nice to send them out with a win on Senior Night. 

“But it was good the amount of people that stayed to recognize them and the other three seniors. Grant’s had a really good two years here, and Youngblood’s from Tuscaloosa originally back home. It would have been nice for him to play a little better. He was one of those that just seemed like he’s a little tired. So we gotta try to figure out how to get his legs back up under him. And Cliff, one of the nicest kids you’ll ever met. I thought that O board where we hit 3 off it, off Grant’s miss at the free throw line was big. I thought maybe it would give us a little bit of a lift and get us going. He’s made some plays like that. So everybody’s capable of doing more. We just gotta get them all to do a little bit more.”

Oats on why he called timeout and met the official under the basket in the first half…

“Obviously, you’re never going to be happy with all the calls I thought Chris got hit in the head on the one play. Apparently, he didn’t because I asked to go look at it. There was a couple of them that I thought we got fouled that ended up with two points going the other way, and that was one of them. But they said it wasn’t, so apparently, it wasn’t.”

Oats on how frustrating was it to see another end-of-half lapse…

“We haven’t been closing halves very well. Very frustrating, to be honest with. We need to do a better job with both clock management and just getting stops when we needed to. Yeah, we felt like we should have been up a little more going in the half. We ended up being down. And then we came back and ended up taking a lead there to start the second half. Then they just started making all the tough plays there after we took – what did we take – a 5-point lead, if I remember right, right there about the first media timeout, somewhere in there. It just seemed like they made every tough play for the next 10 minutes or so.”

Oats on the difficulty of defending Florida’s Alex Condon…

“He’s good. I mean, we didn’t do a great job with our coverage, using those handoffs and ball screens that he kind of got downhill and caught the lobs. He’s a good player. He’s skilled. He led their team in +/- with +12 in his 30 minutes. We obviously didn’t do a great job on him. He made a couple 3s, which we knew he could shoot. He’d hit 11 on the year, I believe, coming into this and kind of gamble a little bit on some of our coverages, leaving him open, and he made us pay on it.”

Oats on what made Florida a difficult to implement a fast style of play…

“You’ve got to be able to rebound the ball on the defensive side to get out in transition. The fact that they had 16 O boards, in order to play fast. I mean, you saw we were taking it out of the net too much. We were trying to run on makes. We were too slow getting it out. But if you can’t get stops, it’s hard to be a fast-paced team taking it out of the net and they’re getting so many O boards. So our defensive rebounding wasn’t where it needed to be. It still ended up being a fairly high-possession game. We had 82, they had 83 possessions, but a lot of that was some of the fouls there late. I agree, through the course of the game, it wasn’t the pace we would have liked to have seen it at. 

“Now, on their end, they got out in transition. Like I said, we had given up 26 points in transition. Some of those were off turnovers. Some of those are off some blocked shots. Some of those, we just didn’t get back after a missed shot. Our discipline in transition was awful tonight, which is disappointing in a game of this caliber, to be honest with you.”

Oats on if he sees a similarity to the end of last year; can he learn anything from that…

“I thought guys quit last year at times. I was very frustrated with our effort in some of those games late. I don’t think that’s the case here. It looked to me like we didn’t have enough pop, but we fought hard. What did we cut it to, four there late? I told them at the timeout, shoot, we were up four with 30 seconds to go at Tennessee and lost the game. We’ve been in this situation on the other side. So I thought they continued to fight.

“I would anticipate us being a lot better Saturday at Auburn. I don’t think this group’s gonna have quit in them. I don’t really have answers to why we didn’t have pop kind of throughout a lot of the game. But they at least fought and didn’t want to quit. I think we got a bunch of pretty high-character kids, young men that they’re gonna keep fighting, where I thought last year, we kind of succumbed to some give-in a little bit, if you will. I didn’t think we had that tonight. We just didn’t quite have the pop we needed to tonight.”

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