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Nate Oats has seen Mark Sears do it in the clutch so many times, but Saturday was special.
This was Auburn, the Tigers were No. 1, and it was on the Plains. Not to mention, Auburn had come to Tuscaloosa 3 weeks ago and beaten Oats’s team in a No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup. But the second time around belonged to Bama, and it really belonged to Sears, the senior guard who’s been through a lot in his 3 seasons at Alabama after transferring from Ohio.
Even earlier this season, Sears was benched by Oats in the second half of a game against LSU, so it hasn’t always been peaches and cream for the coach and player. But the overall respect factor is enormous, and during Saturday’s postgame press conference Oats and Sears broke down the final, fateful shot of Alabama’s regular season. Sears’ running floater at the buzzer in overtime lifted the seventh-ranked Crimson Tide over the Tigers, 93-91.
“When we need him late, he came through and delivered,” Oats said of Sears. “He bailed me out because that play design wasn’t all that great, to be honest with you. The thing that was great about it was it was in a pretty good player’s hands. He delivered there for us late.”
Sears had his own theory about why the final play worked, as he answered Johni Broome’s tying 3-pointer with 15 seconds left in OT with a shot of his own.
“I think it was a good play because it caused a lot of confusion,” said Sears, who became the first player in SEC history to beat a top-ranked team in the AP Poll 3 times. “Earlier in the game, they were switching everything guard-to-guard. So I did a quick handoff to [Labaron Philon] and they didn’t switch, and I was able to get downhill with my left hand. I was able to get it off with enough time, so I would say it was a pretty good play.”
Good enough to end Alabama’s regular season in the best way possible.
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.
