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Nate Oats says Alabama needs to ‘be better against Duke’ before Duke-Arizona game
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Nate Oats has been through a million postgame interviews on the court after important victories.
The Alabama head coach had another such postgame interview on Thursday night after his second-seeded Crimson Tide steamrolled 6-seed BYU in the East Region semifinals in Newark, N.J. His All-American senior point guard, Mark Sears, exploded for 10 3-pointers in a 34-point masterpiece to help Oats’s team roll to a 113-88 victory and the program’s second straight trip to the Elite Eight.
As great as all that was and as hyped up as Oats was after leading Bama to its latest big victory in a few seasons worth of them, Oats couldn’t prevent himself from a major mistake.
When Oats spoke with CBS Sports’s Allie LaForce, he became a sort of prediction-maker in a very accidental and unfortunate way.
“We got to be better against Duke,” flatly stated Oats about a matchup that hasn’t even been set yet.
Yes, top-seeded Duke is a solid favorite to beat 4-seed Arizona in the second regional semifinal of the night from Newark. If the Blue Devils do advance past a very good Wildcats team, then Oats’s postgame statement would have some real truth to it.
But obviously Oats was getting way ahead of himself in saying that his team needs to be better against a team that was just taking the floor to play for the shot to beat Alabama.
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.
