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Nate Oats admits to coaching blunders in final seconds of Alabama’s loss to Tennessee
By Paul Harvey
Published:
Nate Oats has taken Alabama basketball to new heights, but that doesn’t mean the head coach is always on top of his game. In a rare moment of transparency, Oats admitted as much after Saturday’s stunning 79-76 loss to Tennessee.
In that contest, it was actually Oats’s Crimson Tide who held a 76-72 lead with 36 seconds remaining. That’s usually a position a team can ride to the finish line, but Tennessee was able to pull out the victory with Alabama never even reaching the free-throw line inside the final 30 seconds.
That’s because an and-1 basket, 2 free throws after an over-the-back, a jump ball and a 5-second call on Alabama gave the Vols all the time and points they needed to line up a game-winning 3-point heave from Jahmai Mashack. After the game, Oats revealed his coaching miscues inside the final 30 seconds began with subbing out his big men on the free-throw attempt by Chaz Lanier.
It opened the door for the crucial offensive rebound and free throws for Mashack:
“I’m going to take most of the blame in the last 30 seconds. It’s on me,” Oats admitted. “I subbed our bigs out to get the rebound before I should’ve. I shouldn’t have subbed them out until after we secured the rebound.”
That was just the tip of the iceberg. On the fateful 5-seconds call, Oats had a timeout in his pocket but he didn’t call it, and the coach acknowledged he should have pulled the trigger.
“That was on me, and then I had a chance to call timeout (on the inbounds play)… at 4 (seconds) I should have called it. I thought we were getting it in, and that’s on me,” said Oats.
While Alabama is still looking at a strong seed for the NCAA Tournament, it likely takes the Tide off of a 1-seed for now. And for a coach who expects his players to be better at end-of-game situations, Oats knows he has to also be better:
“We work on end-of-the-game situations in practice and expect our players to be good at them, and I was not good,” said Oats. We’ll see how he does moving forward.
Paul Harvey lives in Atlanta and covers SEC football.
