Nate Oats details decision to shuffle roles for his assistant coaches

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The Alabama men’s basketball team has reached the midway point of its SEC schedule and currently leads the conference with an 8-1 mark against league teams.

It is an impressive feat for Crimson Tide coach Nate Oats, who was tasked with replacing his entire coaching staff and most of his roster with only three experienced players returning for the 2023-24 season. As Alabama looks to continue its improved play over the second half of the SEC play, Oats was asked how the new team has grown since the start of the year.

“The staff’s chemistry has been good, but we still had to figure out who’s better at coaching this, who’s better at coaching (that),” Oats said. “We’ve had two former head coaches in Austin (Claunch) and Ryan (Pannone), so both of them can obviously coach both sides of the ball. They’ve had to get a comfort level with that. Where does Preston (Murphy) fit in with everything? He’s one of the best skill developers, talent evaluators, recruiters. He’s also a pretty good X and O coach that I think does a great job with the scouting report.

“We all had to kind of figure out what our niche was going to be. I think it took us a little while to make some changes as to how we all did things there kind of at the end of non-conference play. And we scheduled tough. We always schedule tough, so it’s not like we had five bad losses. We lost to five pretty good teams, and only one of them was here at home.”

After the 2022-23 campaign, all three of Oats’ assistants, who had been with him since his first year at Alabama, left for Division I head coaching jobs elsewhere. He brought in a trio of new assistants, who he praised throughout the offseason, but on Tuesday, Oats revealed that he shuffled the roles of his staff members after going 8-5 in non-conference action.

“It wasn’t like the sky was falling, but we needed to make some changes,” Oats said. “I think we made some appropriate adjustments. I think the players had to figure out how to respond to me as a head coach. Nine out of the 12 scholarship guys hadn’t played here, had not played for me at all. So there was an adjustment, an adjustment to playing our system, an adjustment to playing with each other. 

“I don’t want to act like it’s not the same at a lot of places because there’s a lot of turnover on a lot of rosters, but to have dang near a whole new staff with that much turnover was probably a lot. 

“I think we learned from our losses in non-conference that if you don’t schedule the way you do in the non-conference, I don’t think you’re ready to play in conference play like we were. So I think our non-conference scheduling – even though we lost five games – still got us ready to play in the league.”

Speaking to reporters before No. 16 Alabama’s road trip to No. 12 Auburn, Oats elaborated on what each of his first-year assistant coaches have been responsible for during SEC play.

Below is his complete, four-minute answer.

“I’ve been kind of offensive coordinator, defensive coordinator, and initially, we had Coach Pannone kind of take the defense kind of a role similar to Charlie (Henry),” Oats said. “But part of the reason I hired Ryan was I got to know him really well through offensive stuff, and I think all summer and fall, he had kind of helped institute the offense. He’s obviously the one guy on staff that is much more tilted towards the X and O side. He’s a big video guy. He’s been a head coach in the G League.

“And Coach Claunch, I originally talked to him and kind of talked about running the defense, but then Pannone watches a ton of video and we kind of thought maybe… So we started with Coach Pannone kind of running the defense, Coach Claunch and myself and running the offense and then Preston doing a lot of with the personnel and scouts, kind of like we had Bryan (Hodgson) do. So we kind of just tried to match what it looked like the last four years around here.

“Well, it’s not that cookie-cutter. Coach Pannone has still got a ton of offensive ideas because that’s where his mind kind of goes, and I want him there. Shoot, that’s kind of why I hired him, to help us with the offense. And I think Coach Claunch and Coach Murphy, after seeing the way Coach Pannone and myself talk defense and what we wanted to do, got a lot higher comfort level.

“So we kind of went to a little bit more traditional where Austin and Preston are splitting the scouts on the defensive side. I kind of flipped over to the defensive side more and let Coach (Adam) Bauman and Coach Pannone take the offensive side. And part of it is – to go back to when I was a high school coach – I would kind of train an assistant as to how I wanted the offense run and let him run it, and I coached the defense. 

“When the head coach is much more involved in the defense, they tend to take it a lot more seriously when I get to decide who plays, who doesn’t and playing time and all the other stuff. I’m paying all the attention to the defense in practice. This was a group that our defense was pretty bad. I don’t know how poorly it got. In non-conference, it was down close to being 100. We weren’t going to win a conference championship with the defense being that bad. 

“So I kind of flipped over there, let them know, ‘If you’re not going to guard, not paying attention to it every day in practice, I’m just not going to play your period, and I’m going to be very aware as to who’s focused in on the defensive end and who’s not.’ I do think we’ve made some strides on the defensive end. It’s still nowhere close to where we want it to be. 

“If you look at Auburn, they’re top 15, I believe, in both offensive and defensive efficiency when you look at the metrics. We’re still – depending on – I think in raw offense we’re one and adjusted offense we’re two, and then our defense is still in the 50s. We’re trying to get our defense up in the top 30, and we’ve still got a ways to go.

“But we kind of shuffled some things around. The one thing I’ll say about this staff is all of them are just, ‘Whatever you need, Coach.’ They call all coach basketball – offense, defense, whatever. So they let me kind of shuffle a few things around. Coach Pannone watched more video than everybody I’ve ever known, so he kind of still has input on both sides of the ball, as he’s always going to have, because he’s pretty educated on that stuff.”

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