(Photo Credit: Alabama Athletics)
TUSCALOOSA–Nate Oats’ Alabama team reached the Final Four for the first time in program history last season. His 2024-25 team may be better, though.
This time last year Oats’ group sat at 12-6 and was coming off of a 20-point loss at the hands of Rick Barnes’ Tennessee team. That group would eventually raise its level of play when the time was right. Oats’ current team doesn’t need to drastically raise its level of play, though.
He’s already got a group that’s as talented enough and is playing well enough to win when it matters most.
“Alabama is as good as anybody at capitalizing on your mistakes,” Vanderbilt coach Mark Byington said. “Their pace is incredible. It’s hard to emulate that in our practices, our scout, our film.”
Oats’ group has eclipsed 100 points in two games in a row, one of those performances coming in a win over No. 8 Kentucky, in the fallout of their lone conference loss to Ole Miss. Every Oats team has been capable of putting up numbers like that, but this one feels different.
Alabama has four guards in Mark Sears, Aden Holloway, Labaron Philon and Chris Youngblood that can all create their own shot and can all pick up the slack when need be. It was Holloway’s night on Tuesday as Alabama put 103 points on Vanderbilt behind the 6-foot-1 guard’s 22 points and 11 “blue collar points,” as Oats affectionately calls them. Philon and Youngblood haven’t produced like Sears and Holloway, but have often been able to step up in place of or alongside them. It’s not often that Sears needs his supporting cast to make up for a poor performance, though.
“Pretty much every game, no matter how it starts he ends up with 20 somehow,” Oats said of Sears. “[On] the offensive end he’s been as consistent a guy as I probably ever coached.”
Sears appears to be a microcosm of Alabama’s offense as a whole in that sense. Oats’ style, which has netted Alabama the No. 1 adjusted tempo in the nation, is one that’s high variance by nature. It’s caused Alabama to lose some games that it shouldn’t in the past, but this team appears to be different. Outside of its uncharacteristic loss to Ole Miss, Alabama has appeared to be insulated from those losses more than it has been in other years of Oats’ tenure.
Sears, star forward Grant Nelson and Alabama’s supporting cast have accounted for the nation’s No. 3 offense in KenPom’s offensive efficiency metric despite being just 221st in the country in 3-point shooting. Alabama’s wealth of weapons appears to be one of college basketball’s most difficult groups to cover. How can you account for that core of guards, Nelson’s unicorn-like skillset, Mouhamed Dioubate’s physicality and Cliff Omoruyi’s ability as a lob threat. Facing Alabama’s offense is almost like picking your poison.
Oats sees another aspect of his team that needs to be strengthened to further insulate it from poor outings like it had against Ole Miss, though.
“Some guys are gonna have to decide how good they want to be, how much effort they’re gonna give on the defensive end,” Oats said. “For a team that’s going after a championship, we’ve gotta be a lot better at that…Our defense is not where we need to be.”
Alabama is eighth in the SEC in KenPom’s defensive efficiency metric since the start of conference play and is last in the conference in defensive turnover percentage as well as steal percentage. It has caused some disruption around the rim, particularly against Vanderbilt in a performance in which it blocked nine shots and forced the Commodores to go 6-for-24 on layups, but wants to be a more complete defense.
What it has going for it on that end was shown to Vanderbilt pretty clearly on Tuesday night. Alabama’s length and waves of bodies are boarder line overwhelming to keep track of and can effect things on a game to game basis. Everywhere you look there’s a scorer and a guy who knows his role within what Oats wants to do.
“They know who they are and what they are,” Byington said.
That sentence matters, particularly in the fallout of a stunning loss against Ole Miss. Oats’ team quickly rebounded with a road win at Rupp Arena and its decisive Tuesday win over Vanderbilt.
Alabama knows it can get back to where it’s been because it doesn’t have to find itself. It has seven returners from a Final Four team and knows what each of its pieces have to do to get back there. It also appears to have more talent than the group that got there a year ago.