Nate Oats focused on how to get Alabama ‘playing harder’ after squeaking by vs. Oklahoma
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Nate Oats can be happy about a road SEC victory without being totally pleased with how his 18th-ranked Alabama team executed in a grinding 83-81 win over Oklahoma on Saturday afternoon.
Sure, the Crimson Tide had a solid week after losing 2 in a row, winning at Mississippi State on Tuesday night before coming to Norman and escaping with the 2-point victory. There’s nothing to apologize about after winning back-to-back road games in conference, even if the two opponents are both unranked.
But Oats has presided over a pretty incredible stretch of Alabama basketball, complete with a Final Four trip in 2024. So, the expectations are higher than ever now and so are the standards, so when the Tide fell behind by 11 points at halftime on Saturday, it didn’t sit well with anybody.
“I got to figure out how to get us playing harder for 40 minutes. … I got to do a better job as a head coach getting these guys motivated to give us better effort,” Oats told reporters after Saturday’s comeback win.
Bama looked pretty motivated coming out of the locker room, scoring the first 12 points of the 2nd half to take a 45-44 lead. It set the tone for a comeback victory that improved the Tide to 13-5 overall and 3-2 in the SEC.
All was well on the scoreboard at the very end, because Bama won, but Oats knows that his team must start games better so a comeback like Saturday’s isn’t needed.
“I got to look in the mirror and see what I got to do better as a coach to get our guys a lot more ready to play to start these games,” Oats told reporters afterward.
The first chance to do that will come in exactly a week, with Alabama off during the weekday period before hosting No. 24 Tennessee in a primetime battle in Tuscaloosa that will tip off at 8:30 p.m. ET on ESPN.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
