Instead of a trip to Houston for the school’s first-ever Final Four, the Alabama Crimson Tide remain in Tuscaloosa and stuck high on the list of schools that have never made the final weekend despite 24 appearances in the NCAA tournament.
The lingering question after last week’s Sweet 16 loss to San Diego State: How much weight should be given to what happened in Alabama’s 37th and final game in March, when the first 36 games produced what might have been the school’s best-ever team?
In early February — a week after Alabama shredded Vanderbilt by 57 points and a day before it beat Florida by 28 — Nate Oats offered a thought on the subject that can be revisited.
“College basketball, teams get judged a lot on how they finish in the NCAA tournament,” Oats said Feb 7. “It’s a one-game deal. As you see over the course over the college basketball season — anybody is susceptible to losing, anybody can kind of get a win.
“To purely judge a program just on how they do in the NCAA tournament, I think, is a little short-sighted. I don’t want our guys thinking, ‘Final Four or bust,’ or anything like that. We just need to play our best basketball in March.”
Oats continued by explaining that “luck,” as he put it, played a role in NCAA tournament success.
“Another team goes on fire — sometimes, we didn’t play great against Oklahoma, but they shot it really well,” Oats said of a January loss to the Sooners, who shot 58 percent. “You run up against somebody like that in the tournament, or you just can’t make a shot in the tournament -- there’s some breaks you need to get to make some of these deep runs that these teams make in the NCAA tournament.”
Alabama did not play its best basketball in March, especially offensively, and it did not get the break it needed in the Sweet 16. The end result: a 71-64 loss to San Diego State, and a seat on the couch with all of the other top-three seeded teams in the tournament for the Final Four.
The season-ending defeat was less of a case of the Aztecs catching fire and more a case of Alabama remaining ice cold from three-point range. Alabama made only three of its 27 triples, an 11.1 percent rate that was second-worst on the season. Three of the Tide’s six-worst three-point shooting games came in March, including another loss at Texas A&M.
“We didn’t make shots,” center Charles Bediako said after last Friday’s loss. “They made some tough shots. You know, that’s just how basketball goes. You know, you win some, you lose some.”
That was not the plan for Alabama and Oats, who emphasized all season — and his team often proved it — that it could win even without ideal shooting performances. When Alabama won the SEC tournament, Oats offered three keys to his team making a national championship run — turnovers, defensive intensity and margin plays, including second-chance points and free throws.
“What I won’t say is we’ve got to shoot it well,” he added. “We’ve tried to build a team that can still win when we don’t shoot it well. Can we be great on defense, rebound the ball well, take care of the ball. If we do that, even if we shoot it poorly, I think we can generate enough free throws, rim shots to win.
“I think we’ve got a chance to win the whole thing.”
Against San Diego State, Alabama checked most of the boxes Oats wanted his team to cover. The Tide won the rebounding battle, 52-48. It had a 20-18 edge in second-chance points, and made 15-of-20 free throws compared to the Aztecs’ 13-of-22. San Diego State shot 37.7 percent from the field, which was almost exactly average for all Tide opponents this season.
But Alabama turned the ball over 14 times compared to 12 for San Diego State, and it ultimately did nothing else well enough to overcome its three-point slump.
Mike Rodak is an Alabama beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @mikerodak.
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