Alabama Football is going through a transition of power as their Basketball team has never had more thanks to Nate Oats.
by Jordan Beckley
There’s something so peculiar about seeing Nick Saban sit at the College GameDay desk smack dab in between Kirk Herbstreit and Pat McAfee.
One of the most reserved coaches is now on the sport’s most influential show next to a guy in McAfee who’s big thing is that he doesn’t shut up. Saban will no longer be seen huffing and puffing as he stalks the Alabama sideline with his head down barking orders into his mic. Instead ESPN hopes that Saban will be less stiff in his segments than he is on his AFLAC commercials.
It’s a change in tide as maybe the greatest Coach of the 21st century in any sport (he’s quite comfortably number 1 in CFB) has hung it up and has been replaced in Tuscaloosa by Kalen DeBoer.
When Saban won his first of seven National Titles, DeBoer was a 25 year old OC at Division II University of Sioux Falls. By 2009 Deboer had graduated to Head Coach of the USF Cougars and Saban won his first National Title as HC of the Crimson Tide. Fast forward a decade and a half to present day and Nick Saban has more Alabama Championship Rings than fingers and Deboer just won his first two games of his tenure succeeding the GOAT.
Lots of things are strange and novel in Tuscaloosa and one of those things is that the Tide now keeps rolling past early January.
I’m talking about how Nate Oats has made Alabama a school with a Basketball team worth rooting for.
This past season Coach Oats made history bringing Alabama it’s first ever appearance in the Final Four. It was a crowning jewel moment for Oats and his turnaround in Tuscaloosa. It was perhaps an unexpected bid to Phoenix for the Tide, but it capped off a string of successful seasons and validated Oats as someone who can win in March not just in the regular season.
The Final Four drew wandering eyes from big CBB brands like Kentucky towards the rising star coach at a non-traditional Basketball program and prompted Alabama’s administration to lock Oats up long term.
As Alabama turns the page in Bryant-Denny Stadium, Nate Oats looks to make Coleman Coliseum a house of worship as well and maybe make Alabama a Basketball School too.
Oats Sowing Seeds of Success
Nate Oats came to Tuscaloosa in 2019 after a string of success at Buffalo University.
During the decade where Saban was winning his first few titles at Alabama & LSU, Oats was coaching High School Basketball at Romulus High School in the Detroit area. Predictably, Oats was a darn good high school coach too. His team went 27-1 on their way to become State Champions in his final season. His best player was being recruited by new Buffalo Head Coach Bobby Hurley and Hurley was so impressed with Oats that he brought him onto the staff as well.
After two successful seasons in upstate New York including a March Madness bid, Hurley was hired at Arizona State and Oats was promoted to 1st Chair. Oats made the most of his opportunity for the Bulls immediately making the NCAA tournament in his first season. In his third & fourth seasons in Buffalo, Oats won MAC regular season Titles and the conference tournament earning two more March Madness bids.
In the 2018 NCAA Tournament, Oats and the no.13 seeded Bulls stampeded the Deandre Ayton Arizona team 89-68. The next year, Nate Oats beat Arizona State and Bobby Hurley in the first round as he bested the Coach who gave him his shot. The Bulls went 32-4 that season and Oats was lured away from Buffalo to move south to replace Avery Johnson at Alabama.
His first season for the Crimson Tide was forgettable. The 2019-20 campaign like many schools was hard to judge with the Covid-19 outbreak disrupting the sport, but the season did have a bright spot as Oats proved his development chops with Sophomore guard Kira Lewis becoming an All-SEC 1st team player and a lottery pick in the 2020 NBA Draft.
Lewis would be the first of many as Oats would get 5 players drafted in the next few seasons and have 6 players overall get NBA minutes.
Three of those NBA players were on the 2020-21 team that came out of nowhere the next season to win the SEC regular season Title and Conference Tournament. The Tide went 19-2 in all SEC competitions winning the regular season over Arkansas by two games and the Tourney Final over LSU by 1 point. The SEC Double earned Alabama a no.2 seed for just the third time ever in school history (1987, 2002). The team lead by Jaden Shackelford, John Petty, Jahvon Quinerly and Herb Jones would make the Sweet Sixteen blowing past Iona and Maryland before falling short to Mick Cronin’s Final Four UCLA team.
This season launched Oats and Alabama. Soon the Crimson Tide started landing 5-Star recruits like JD Davison, Brandon Miller and now Derrion Reid this upcoming season. After a Covid era soft launch, Oats was selling out games and buzz was building around the Alabama Basketball program.
A Basketball School?
One tradition that Nate Oats started at Buffalo and has carried to Alabama is his Blue Collar Point system. The system rewards players who make hustle plays like charges, deflections, nice rotations, hard cuts, etc. that don’t show up in the box score. The player with the most receives a hard hat at the end of the game.
It’s a fun locker room tradition, but it’s a mentality that the fans have adopted too. Look out into the Alabama student section in Coleman Coliseum and you will see a sea of Crimson with white hard hats dotting the boisterous crowd.
It’s a visible symbol of the change that Oats has brought. He’s come into a Football town and created an atmosphere and spirit around the other team in town. Sure, interest often follows success, but Oats is more than just a cunning coach. He is one helluva marketer too.
The marketing goes hand in hand with the winning. After a so-so year in 2021-22 with a 5th place finish in the SEC and a 1st Round exit in March Madness, Oats had the program’s best season ever in 2022-23.
The Tide rolled to a program record 31 wins en route to Oats’ second SEC Championship (& Tournament Title) and the school’s first ever no.1 seed. Brandon Miller was SEC Player of the Year and Oats’ first All-American.
The season ended in disappointment as the overall no.1 seed Bama was upset in the Sweet Sixteen by eventual National Runner Up San Diego State. It was an underwhelming tournament performance that would subject Oats to questions about his tournament coaching chops. He would answer those questions the very next season.
Last year’s team was in many ways the perfect encapsulation of a Nate Oats’ team. Oats is known as an analytical coach quick to adopt progressive strategy based on statistics… aka his teams shoot a ton of threes. All 5 of Oats’ teams have shot almost exactly 30 threes a game which has been good for anywhere from 2nd to 8th most in the country. For context, the Tide shoot about 62-65 shots per game so just a shade under 1 out of every 2 shots is taken from 22+ feet back.
Compare those astronomical numbers to Purdue another team known for their three point shooting and analytical approach. The Boilermakers only launched 20 a game at the 2nd best rate in the nation (40.4%). The scary part about 2023-24 Alabama was they hit about 37.3% of that absurd volume netting a total of 413 total threes. That’s nearly a hundred more made threes than Purdue had.
When the two teams met in December, Alabama used the three pointer as an equalizer for the mismatch of Zach Edey in the paint launching 46 THREE POINT ATTEMPTS! The Tide attempted just 18 2 point shots. Bama had fewer attempts from within the arc than they did made threes (19) and it was the same number of total three point attempts that Purdue had. And it almost worked! Purdue needed Edey to be unbelievable (35pts) and Braden Smith to pour in a career high 27 points to outscore Alabama 92-86.
This aggressive approach can be high variance and last year’s team saw the good and the bad of it. The Bad was Bama starting 6-5 (with a much tougher schedule than most teams) and the Good was winning four straight in March Madness including upsetting no.1 seed North Carolina to make the school’s first Final Four.
Oats has been a forward thinking coach in a very traditional state. Fans may have been reluctant to adopt his analytical approach, but when Alabama is clicking it’s hard to ignore the results and it’s incredibly entertaining to watch. With more talented teams surely to come, Oats will continue to curry favor as Alabama continues to become more and more of a Basketball school.
Run it Back
The 2023-24 Tide ran ashore against UConn, because well everyone has come up short against the Huskies the past two seasons. Now, Oats is bringing several key pieces back and reloading with more ammo from the portal and from high ranked recruits. The 2024-25 Tide team will be legitimate National Title threats.
BetMGM has the early lines for National Championships and Bama is 4th at 12-1. Perhaps the main reason to be so high on Bama is the return of my best guess for early NPOY favorite Mark Sears. Sears was a 1st Team All-SEC pick and a 2nd Team All-American last season after averaging 21.5ppg when taking over complete control of the backcourt with Jahvon Quinerly gone. The former Ohio Bobcat made a leap in his second season in Tuscaloosa as an electric scorer making 43.6% of his threes on 6 attempts a game and drawing Jalen Brunson comparisons.
Sears will be joined by returning teammates Latrell Wrightsell, Jarin Stevenson and Grant Nelson. All three of them had up and down years, but its quite easy to envision all of them as high level contributors. Especially, Nelson who looks to have his own second year transfer jump after really finding his own down the stretch last season.
Oats didn’t just stand pat and let roster attrition win. The coach went out and grabbed four players out of the portal to restock the depth chart.
Chis Youngblood won the AAC Player of the Year for conference champion South Florida by averaging 15.3ppg while shooting 41.6% from three on 5att. Houston Mallette was a highly coveted transfer after scoring 14ppg the past three years for Pepperdine (41.5 3P% on 5.1att). Aden Holloway was a top-ranked recruit and a high volume if streaky shooter who averaged 7.3 ppg in 20 mpg for rival Auburn.
That’s three explosive talents ready to let loose a barrage of long range missiles, but what failed to make Alabama a true Title contender last year was defense not shooting. Nate Oats missed the long rangy defenders like Noah Clowney, Charles Bediako, Noah Gurley, and Herb Jones that made previous Crimson Tide teams a top-5 Kenpom defense.
Alabama hopes that two time 1st Team All-Big Ten Defensive team center Cliff Omoruyi can help fix that. The Rutgers grad-transfer will almost certainly start at center for Alabama hopefully being a rim stopper with his 221 career blocks and a rim running lob threat to compliment all the explosive perimeter players.
Oats will also look for length in 5-Star Freshman forward Derrion Reid and Prolific Prep teammate 4-Star Freshman big Aiden Sherrell. Two other 4-star recruits are joining the fold too in Labaron Philon and Naas Cunningham as Alabama has locked down another program best class under Oats.
In my opinion, Alabama is probably the most talented team from top to bottom in the country next year.
Tremendous talent in your spots 10-13 is a luxury but can often be a hindrance. Will everyone be okay if their role is closer to the back of the bench than being the no.1 option? With a guy like Mark Sears as the headliner, hopefully everyone knows who “the guy” is. How about the defensive chemistry and effort level? Will the players relegated to support roles be ready to embrace Oats’ hardhat mentality?
Even if the defense clicks and the rotation falls into place, the turbulent play style will offer high variance that could lead to a disappointing exit in March. At the same time, what if the shots go in? Nate Oats might have his most loaded team yet, and with a coach as disciplined and effective as Oats other teams should be worried.
Basketball will never be bigger than CFB for the Rolling Tide, but that doesn’t mean the Football team’s Championship Excellence won’t rub off.
Nate Oats has checked every box so far. Win in recruiting, Win in the portal, Win the SEC, Win the SEC Tournament, Win in March Madness… one more box remains and this year’s Bama team is capable of checking it off.
After one of the most successful stretches in CFB history from Saban, we might see Oats push the Tide further and make the school a Champion in Basketball as well.