Nate Oats expecting and welcoming a 'tighter whistle' in NCAA Tournament
CLEVELAND — The SEC hasn’t only been the best league in college basketball this season, it’s also been arguably the most physical. With teams like Tennessee, Texas A&M, Auburn and plenty more, there’s an overwhelmingly physical nature and style of play that exists more frequently in the SEC than other league around the sport.
With a more physical league comes more contact being allowed by officials. But when the NCAA Tournament comes around and teams from all different leagues are playing each other, the whistle is typically a little tighter than in an SEC regular season game.
Ahead of Alabama’s first round NCAA Tournament game tomorrow, head coach Nate Oats was asked about how he prepares for that reality.
“Look, I’ll say this: It’s a great question,” Oats said. “I actually addressed it with our team today, as Labaron (Philon) fouled somebody in practice today on a blatant obvious one that seemed to me blatant and obvious should get called 100 percent of the time, everywhere across the globe in basketball, but didn’t always get called in our league.
“I just said, look, some of the physicality that some of our opponents have been able to get away with in our league, it’s not going to go in this tournament.”
Oats believes officials in the SEC needed to allow less contact, and fully expects less leeway on foul calls in the tournament.
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“I’ll say this for the SEC: We’ve got great leadership, starting at the top with Greg Sankey, but Garth Glissman came from from the NBA, he’s given the coaches a lot of data,” Oats said. “The fouling needed to decrease in the SEC. The officials were instructed to call more fouls, obviously right away, out of the gate.
“In our first exhibition game against Memphis, there was a million fouls called, and I think they tried to — I’ll say this: I expect it to be a much tighter whistle in the NCAA Tournament, and I think we haven’t been as physical in the fouling aspect all the time as maybe some other teams in our league. I think maybe we’ll have a little less adjustment to the whistle.”
Oats also has complete faith in his team if they do run into a team that wants to play overly physical with them, given how they’ve handled and beaten teams with a reputation of high physicality numerous times this season.
“If a team tries to get physical with us in the tournament, we’re used to physicality. Everybody tries to get physical with us, stop our offense,” Oats said. “We’re the No. 1 scoring offense in the country, grabbing, holding, not letting us cut. It’s been an effective strategy if it doesn’t get called. So I think our guys will be able to play with the physicality and I’m actually welcoming have been a little bit tighter whistle to give them a little more freedom of movement hopefully than maybe what we’ve had in the regular season.”
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