It wasn’t March Madness, because this wasn’t the NCAA Tournament or even the SEC Tournament yet. But it was March, and that means the spotlight was turned up brightly and the stakes were high for an Alabama basketball program desperate to shed its reputation for coming up short.

But Saturday night, despite being in the friendly, raucous confines of Coleman Coliseum and despite having a 7-point lead in the 2nd half, the Crimson Tide came up short.

Again.

With ESPN’s basketball version of College GameDay in T-Town for the first time, everything wonderful was in place for one of the biggest stages Bama basketball has ever enjoyed. The first Saturday in March seemingly belonged to Nate Oats and the Crimson Tide, only a veteran Tennessee team didn’t care to read the script, rallying for an 81-74 victory to complete a regular-season sweep of Bama.

It was a really, really bad time for Alabama to suffer its first SEC home loss in over 2 years. So instead of entering the final week of the regular season with a 1-game lead in the conference, with an outright league title in their grasp, the Tide (20-9, 12-4 SEC) are instead staring up at the Volunteers (23-6, 13-3) with 2 games to go until everyone heads to Nashville next week for the SEC Tournament. Suddenly, that outright crown is pretty much out the window, with the Vols holding the tiebreaker by virtue of that season sweep of the Tide.

Bama would need to win at Florida on Tuesday night, beat Arkansas at home on Saturday and then have Tennessee drop its final 2 games against South Carolina and Kentucky. The Vols have their work cut out for them this week against 2 surging ranked teams, heading to Columbia on Wednesday night before a Saturday afternoon showdown with John Calipari’s crew in Knoxville.

Would it be unheard of for the Tide to steal the regular-season SEC title from the Vols during this final, frantic week? Absolutely not.

But the odds are the repeat regular-season championship Oats’ high-octane but flawed team had its eyes on all winter probably slipped out one of Coleman Coliseum’s side doors late in Saturday night’s loss.

The odds also are that Alabama will have to settle for a 2 or even a 3 seed in Nashville, where it will aim to defend the SEC Tournament title it rolled to last March behind Brandon Miller and Co.

And then what? Well, then there’s the one that really matters, the NCAA Tournament, the one that Bama entered last year as the overall No. 1 seed before getting bounced in the Sweet 16. SEC regular-season and tournament titles are nice and all, but Alabama won’t truly be taken seriously on a national level until it achieves big-time success on the biggest stage.

Last year was a major flop in that department, let’s be honest, and that came with Miller. Minus a major-league talent like Miller this time around, can this Alabama team, with all its strengths (and warts), finally squeeze through and get to the Final Four for the first time in program history?

Sometimes, it’s the seasons that look so special that descend into dust (like last year) and it’s the good-but-not-great seasons like this year that become special. Here are 3 reasons Alabama can make everyone forget about last season’s flameout and 3 reasons it is destined to fall short yet again this March.

We’ll start with the 3 reasons for hope:

1. The sheer motivation

Let’s not kid ourselves. Oats and his returning players who experienced last season’s shocking loss in the Sweet 16 would never admit to the level of disappointment. But you only get so many real cracks at a national championship, as a coach or player, and when you’re fortunate enough to be a No. 1 seed, losing before the Elite Eight is absolutely crushing.

While Miller is long gone to the Charlotte Hornets, Mark Sears remembers. Nick Pringle remembers. So does Rylan Griffen. Sears has blossomed into a star this season, averaging a hair under 21 points to lead the SEC, along with 4 rebounds, 4 assists and 2 steals on 51% field-goal shooting and 43% from 3-point land. He’s really good and he’ll be really motivated to lead Bama a little further than last season. Pringle and Griffen are major rotation pieces now, and you just know they can’t wait for another shot on the biggest stage.

Then there’s Oats, who said all the right things in the aftermath of the early elimination, about how hard it was to win an SEC regular-season and tournament title and get to a Sweet 16. And that’s all true, too. But you know he was devastated, and you know it will drive him in a few weeks when it all starts again. This is a program with everything to prove this month, and just maybe that motivation (along with a little momentum down the stretch here) can be the difference this time around.

2. Boy, can they score

The “defense wins championships” mantra will never go away, and for good reason, because defense does win championships. But how often do you see high-seeded tournament teams go down in flames after 1 bad shooting night? Last March, that was Alabama, when Miller went 3-for-19 in the loss to San Diego State. The Tide shot a miserable 32% and went an unthinkable 3-for-27 from long range, with Sears and Griffen combining to go 1-for-10 from 3-point land. The Aztecs had something to do with that, too, of course.

And, of course, even this season’s Bama team could suffer a shooting stinker at just the wrong time. But man have they lit up the scoreboard all winter. Saturday night’s 74-point output was the exception to the rule. Only once this season have the Tide scored fewer points, back on Jan. 20 when they managed 71 against, yep, Tennessee in a 20-point loss in Knoxville. So, clearly the Vols have held the Tide in check, but nobody else in the SEC or non-conference has. Bama has broken the 100-point barrier an astounding 9 times this season, and it’s broken 90 on 6 other occasions.

The firepower has been there from early November through early March, and if they can avoid that 1 season-crushing shooting night, who knows, the Tide could finally be playing in early April.

3. Free from controversy — and that No. 1 overall seed

It’s true that everything was set up for a magical Final Four run last March. It’s also true that everything was sort of set up for a big-time letdown, and Tide basketball fans (as usual) got the latter. Bama is the bluest of blue-bloods over at Bryant-Denny Stadium but not at Coleman Coliseum.

Who really knows if the pressure of that giant “1” next to their name really caught up with the Tide last year, but it might have on that fateful night against San Diego State. This time, the burden of being a 1 seed won’t be there, and that might be the best thing. Bama will be a lower seed and will be strictly under the radar, where it’s used to being. It also won’t be lugging the Miller gun controversy into March like it did a year ago, amid a tragedy that came with extreme backlash nationally. Instead, the Tide can just go play basketball, with whatever solid seeding they end up with.

Now, for the 3 reasons to be scared (again):

1. Boy, can they give up points

This is the dangerous flip side to being a scoring machine. Bama has been, well, bad this season on defense, and at times it’s been downright horrible. The missed assignments have been plentiful on a game-to-game basis, and the fixes have yet to come, although even in defeat Saturday night was a step in the right direction with the Tide holding mighty Tennessee to a manageable 81 points and the SEC’s 2nd-leading scorer, Dalton Knecht, to 13 points on 5-for-14 shooting.

But when giving up 81 points in a game is considered pretty good, you might be in trouble. Just imagine where this Tide team would be this season if it played even a little defense. The numbers are pretty ugly. In 29 games, Bama has allowed 80-plus points a staggering 15 times. Not surprisingly, 9 of those times have come in the Crimson Tide’s 9 losses this season. This is a recipe for eventual disaster in March, especially if Alabama does find its way into the 2nd weekend of the NCAA Tournament, where the big boys with the potent offenses await.

So, it’s the worst kept secret in the world that the Tide are going to have to simply outscore teams if they’re going to do any kind of damage later this month. And that’s asking a lot for even the most lethal offenses, which Bama just happens to have.

2. Not measuring up against the elite

Yes, the Tide have taken care of business against the SEC’s mediocre and bad teams, going a perfect 9-0 against the squads who sit 7th and lower in the conference. But against the 5 other good teams in the league — we’re talking Tennessee, South Carolina, Kentucky, Auburn and Florida — Bama is just 3-4, and 1 of those wins was an overtime squeaker at home over Florida. Of course, it makes sense that the Tide’s 4 league losses have come against the better teams, with 2 coming to first-place Tennessee. But for a team that was playing for the outright lead in its conference in early March, you’d like to see a little more success against the elite teams.

Bama’s troubling trend exists on a national level, too, when you look back to November and December. There were losses to unranked Power 5 teams Ohio State and Clemson in November, followed by December setbacks to powerhouses Purdue, Creighton and Arizona. Again, in an almost full body of work now, you’d like to see more success against good-to-great teams to inspire any confidence in a deep March run. And it’s just not there.

3. Not enough production up front

This last one could be a reach, considering how guards have taken over basketball at the pro and college levels. But when the shots from outside aren’t falling consistently, when the guards who dominate your team’s offensive production like Sears, Griffen, Latrell Wrightsell and Aaron Estrada are struggling a bit, it’s always nice to have that guy inside who can get you points in the most crucial moments, which is exactly what we’re heading toward. For the Tide, who exactly is that frontline source?

The only forward averaging over 7 points per game for the Tide is 6-11 senior Grant Nelson, who is at 12 points per contest, which is fine. But he’s only reached the 20-point plateau twice in conference play, and there have been a lot of single-digit outputs mixed in over the past 2 months, including a 3-point clunker in Saturday night’s loss. Nelson is a nice player with OK numbers, but he’s not going to strike fear in you, and it just feels like Bama’s lack of brawn down low might cost it when it really counts.

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