Oats, Alabama Basketball Players Not Backing Down From Scheduling Philosophy
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Alabama basketball enters the 2022-23 season with one of the hardest schedules in the country staring it dead in the face.
The Crimson Tide, which sits at No. 20 in the preseason AP Poll, has eight games against other ranked teams on its schedule, all of which sit in the top-15.
This is no different than a season ago, where Alabama faced the No. 2 ranked strength of schedule in all of college basketball according to the analytics service KenPom.
Last season’s schedule was a well-documented topic of discourse surrounding the roller coaster of a season that head coach Nate Oats’ third Alabama team went through. Alabama defeated three teams that went to the 2021 Final Four – Gonzaga, Baylor and Houston – participated in the ESPN Events Invitational and defeated Miami – a 2022 elite eight participant – and also played multiple mid-major conference champions before playing in the ever-improving SEC the rest of the season.
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By the end of the season, Alabama held a record of 19-14, despite all of those big wins, and many observers of the program assigned blame to the difficulty of the schedule.
Oats disagrees.
“I don’t think [the schedule] had anything to do with it,” Oats said.
Oats put much of the blame of last season’s shortcomings on mindset, claiming that if his teams can get up for games against teams like Gonzaga, it should have no problem being ready for games against lesser teams such as Georgia, Missouri or Iona.
“You beat Gonzaga, everybody thinks they’ve got it figured out,” Oats said. “It was more of a mindset of bringing it every game, not feeling yourself after a big win.”
Oats has said on many occasions that he would prefer to test his team in the non-conference and be exposed early in the season rather than being exposed in conference play and as March approaches. He said the team playing their best basketball in March is always the goal.
“I want our guys to play against tough teams, whether it’s the non-conference, preseason, whatever,” Oats said. “We’ll be better for it, it’s good for us.”
Alabama graduate student forward Noah Gurley returned to the Crimson Tide for his final year of eligibility after transferring in as a senior a season ago. He feels that it’s beneficial for the team to see other quality teams outside of the SEC before getting to the NCAA Tournament.
“We’re playing teams that we haven’t seen before in the NCAA Tournament,” Gurley said. “When we schedule these teams in the non-conference they play different depending on what conference they’re from. They have different strengths, different weaknesses. It’ll give us a good gist of college basketball across the country in general.”
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Gurley even gave an example of the differences between a few of Alabama’s upcoming non-conference opponents.
“Houston is an overly physical team. Gonzaga is a fast team. Memphis is a very talented team. Different flavors of college basketball,” Gurley said.
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