Nate Oats shares message to Alabama team ahead of 'big' final week

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The Alabama men’s basketball team has a big week ahead of it.

The Crimson Tide (20-9, 12-4 SEC) still has a shot – albeit slim – at the SEC’s regular-season crown, but it will need some help after its 81-74 loss to Tennessee this past weekend.

Alabama will close out its set schedule with a road trip to Florida on Tuesday, March 5, before hosting Arkansas on Saturday, March 9, in its regular-season finale. The Tide needs some help to win the league, but it won’t matter if it doesn’t win the two games in front of it.

“This is a good life lesson,” head coach Nate Oats said. “There’s lots of things in life that you can put everything you’ve got into it and you may not get the results you want, but you still need to put everything you have into it. You may go for a job interview … you could hit it out of the park, do the best you absolutely could and still come up second and not get the job. 

“We could hit it out of the park, go 2-0 and still not win the league. It’s still the right thing to do. It shows character, and we have no shot of winning it if we don’t come out and go 2-0. We’ve gotta come out ready to play, give it a championship-level effort and let the chips fall where they may with Tennessee’s two games this week.”

No. 16 Alabama could have had full control of its destiny had it been able to beat Tennessee on its home floor, but the Tide’s offense – which remains No. 1 nationally in KenPom’s efficiency rankings – stalled against the Vols. There was a 13-minute stretch in the second half where UA went 1-for-17 on its first attempts from the field and had four turnovers.

“I felt like our offense cost us that game more than anything against Tennessee,” Oats said.

“I told our guys, we’ve got the No. 1 offense in the country. It needs to look like the No. 1 offense in the country every game for the entire 40 minutes. It can’t leave us for a 13-minute stretch where we took a bunch of poor shots and had some bad turnovers. So we keep stressing defense and our defense has to get better. 

“I thought our defense was better. We played harder. But our offense left us over half of the second half, and we didn’t play very well. We’ve gotta have both going. Championship teams have great offenses and great defenses at the same time. That’s where we’ve gotta get to.”

In his talks with the team since the Tennessee loss, Oats has brought up past championship teams who didn’t win their league but went on to cut down the nets in the NCAA Tournament. He mentioned the 2022-23 UConn team that finished the regular season with a 24-7 record and lost to Marquette in the Big East Tournament before winning six straight.

“Shoot, they didn’t win the regular season or the tournament, to be honest with you, and won a national championship,” Oats said. “There’s things teams are playing for beyond just the one game in front of them, but we’ve gotta get momentum going into March for the SEC Tournament, the NCAA Tournament and we need to be playing our best basketball.”

Entering a pivotal game not only for Alabama’s fading hopes of winning the SEC regular season for the third time in four years but also playing for a top-four seed in the SEC Tournament, Oats’ message to his team has been measured before a rematch with UF.

But how have they been received by the Crimson Tide’s players?

“My biggest point was if you’re a high-character competitor, you compete no matter what’s on the line. We’ve gotta come out and play,” Oats said. “I thought practice was good today. I thought the intensity was good. It was short. We probably went an hour and 20. We didn’t go super long. We didn’t practice yesterday. We just went over video of Tennessee and Florida. 

“But we got one practice in today, and I thought it was good, hard, crisp. I like where our heads are at. I think we’ll come out ready to go.”

Tomorrow’s Alabama-Florida game is scheduled to tip off at 6 p.m. CT and air on ESPN.

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