How Nate Oats plans to handle Alabama basketball's bye week

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — For the second straight season, all SEC basketball teams received a midweek bye in their league schedules, going from a Saturday to a Saturday without a game on Tuesday/Wednesday. Alabama’s midweek bye conveniently fell at the halfway mark of the team’s schedule, having completed nine games and with nine more games to go.

The Crimson Tide beat Georgia by 21 points at home on Saturday, and won’t play again until its road trip to Arkansas on Saturday night. Addressing the media after speaking to the Birmingham Tip Off Club in Birmingham on Monday, head coach Nate Oats detailed how he plans to handle his team during this bye.

“I think it’s huge for a physical reset. We’ve got a lot of guys banged up,” Oats said. “We’ve adjusted our original plan. Our original plan was to go hard twice this week to stay really on top. We’re only gonna go hard once in practice and make sure it’s a lot more controlled than maybe what a game will be.”

Two of Alabama’s freshman are dealing with injuries in Derrion Reid and Labaron Philon. Reid played his second game back on Saturday after missing five straight games with a lower body injury, and still doesn’t visibly look 100 percent healthy. Philon suffered an ankle injury in practice a little over a week ago, was moved out of the starting lineup and played lesser minutes than usual because of it the last few games.

Oats also wanted to use the week to keep the players mentally fresh, and had a surprise for them during practice on Monday.

“Mentally, we did an hour of skill and then took them out and did mini golf for an hour and a half,” Oats said. “I had a practice – it looked really hard when the guys looked at it this morning, but I knew I was cutting it halfway. They shouldn’t expect that ever again, but today we tried to get them a little more mentally fresh. I got a little but of mini golf practice in with some of the players.”

Alabama is gearing up for a stretch run that features back-to-back road games against Arkansas and Texas, followed by seven straight games against ranked opponents to close the season. Those games include two meetings with No. 1 Auburn, a road trip to No. 4 Tennessee, and a home game against No. 6 Florida.

“Listen, I don’t think you can talk about the seven games, because if you start talking about the seven, then you’re skipping two, and you could easily drop either of those two,” Oats said. “I don’t think you can look at Auburn at home, Auburn away — you can’t do anything but literally look at the next game, prep for it. We got practice today, how do we get better today at what we gotta get better at? Just let everything fall where it may. I think when you start getting down the road at some of that stuff you get tripped up. You think the last game at Auburn is gonna be a big one, then all of a sudden you don’t take care of something in front of it, and it has no meaning anymore, because the regular season’s already determined.

“I don’t think we can look ahead like that as a team, as a program. The fans can look forward to it. As a team, we can’t really look at that.”

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