Alabama’s men’s basketball team is hoping to make up for a bruising loss to the Ole Miss Rebels. The catch is, Saturday’s game is against Kentucky which just beat Texas A & M eighty one to sixty nine. The Tide’s seventy-four to sixty four loss this week to Ole Miss is being called the worst ever at Alabama for head coach Nate Oats. The coach says his team didn’t show up ready for the Rebels.
“To be honest with you, with the amount of fifth year seniors we have and the leadership that should be shown on this team to have guys not come in ready to play. It's like it starts with me, because I'm supposed to be the one motivating these guys, and I obviously didn't motivate them,” he said.
The Rebels’ Malik Dia continued to come alive in conference play. He tallied double-digit points just twice in fourteen nonconference games, but he has scored 21, 19 and 23 points in his last three games. For Alabama, turnovers were a consistent problem for Alabama earlier in the season, at one point committing 14 or more turnovers six times in a seven-game stretch. The first three conference games were a slight improvement, but the Crimson Tide ended with 21 turnovers. Tide coach Nate Oats says his team just wasn’t ready to play Ole Miss…
“Defensively, we definitely had some mistakes, and we should have been better, but we lost this game on the offensive end,” Oats said. We lost the game with our turnovers, our lack of effort on the offensive class guys that we count on to go get offensive rebounds came through with nothing for us.”
Ole Miss attempted seventy shots from the field compared to Alabama's forty seven, largely due to the Crimson Tide's turnovers. Alabama was better on a per-shot basis — Alabama shot 43% from the field while Ole Miss shot 39% — but the disparity in shot attempts was too much to overcome. After playing Kentucky on the road tomorrow, the Tide hosts Vanderbilt in Tuscaloosa on Tuesday.
Editor’s note: During APR’s “Morning Edition” broadcast, we said that Alabama’s game against Ole Miss was on Wednesday, when it was Tuesday. We regret the error.
