Nate Oats remaining forthright about Alabama's national championship goals
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — The 2024-25 college basketball season starts in two days, and headed into this year, Alabama is viewed as one of the favorites to win the national title.
The Crimson Tide is coming off its first-ever Final Four, and with its combination of returners from last years team and talented incoming players from high school and the transfer portal, Nate Oats ' team has become a popular pick to cut down the nets come April.
The AP and Coaches Poll both have Alabama ranked No. 2 in the preseason, its highest preseason ranking ever. College basketball media personalities across the country have Alabama ranked as high as No. 1 entering the season.
Crimson Tide players haven't shied away from the team's preseason expectations, openly talking about that being the reason many of them decided to either come back to Alabama or join this team in the first place.
"When I was in the draft process, I was keeping up and seeing the roster the coaching staff was putting together," preseason All-American guard Mark Sears said. "And I was like, man this roster could contend for a national championship. And I wanted to be a part of it."
Rather than trying to temper expectations publicly, Oats has only fueled the expectations himself.
"I like the fact that they've got big goals," Oats said. "I don't think we want guys that are selling themselves short. I think we've got the talent, that's what we should be talking about."
But most teams don't just start the year being championship-caliber, and Oats recognizes that. He brought up how teams are needed to improve over the course of the year in order to raise themselves to the level of a team that can win a national championship.
He used UConn in 2023 as an example, a team that went through a ton of growing pains before winning their first of back-to-back national titles.
"You look at, UConn's on the last two, you look at the first one they won, I think they lost five of seven games in a stretch there in January or something," Oats said. "There's lots of things that happen through a season that make you better to get you to the point you can win. Nobody thought UConn was going to win a national championship when they were losing the games they did in January or whatever it was. There's gonna be teams that put themselves in the mix to win a national championship that nobody's talking about right now."
As far as where Alabama needs to improve, Oats naturally jumped to the Crimson Tide's defense. Oats' best regular season teams at Alabama came in 2021 and 2023, both years where Alabama ranked in the top-3 in defensive efficiency at the end of the season.
Last year, though the team made the Final Four, the regular season performance wasn't up to par with Oats' better teams. The team last season struggled mightily on the defensive end, ranking an abysmal 111th at the end of the season in defensive efficiency.
Those efficiency numbers are important to Oats, and he plans on using them as goals within games to keep his players locked in and work towards what their greater goal is.
"So we've talked about getting our defense back up to one of the best defenses in the country. Well, those efficiency numbers count on the first game," Oats said. "The first three teams are all very good. The efficiency numbers that we're trying to get on the defensive side are going to be hard to get against these three teams, but that's our goal, is to get them. Every timeout we're going to be talking about what our points per possession were on defense the last four minutes, every game going in – we've got goals within the games to keep our guys focused, that I think will help get them ready to go each game."
Alabama's schedule may look like it has a few "easy games" on it, but Oats even schedules tough when it comes to his mid-major opponents.
UNC Asheville was an NCAA Tournament team last year and won the Big South Conference. Arkansas State, coached by former Alabama assistant Bryan Hodgson , is the preseason favorite to win the Sun Belt. McNeese, coached by former LSU head coach Will Wade , was an NCAA Tournament team last year and is expected to be back with an even better roster, picked to win the Southland and receiving votes in the preseason top 25.
Alabama will be massive favorites in these games, but despite the talent gap, Oats has ensured the team has smaller goals to work towards that will ultimately serve their larger goal of doing what's never been done in Tuscaloosa, bringing the basketball program a national championship.
