Vicky Graff Photo
Nate Oats understands that Kentucky’s three losses — Clemson, Georgia and Ohio State — have not been in Rupp Arena and only one (Ohio State) was on a neutral court.
The Crimson Tide play at Kentucky today and Oats knows how hard winning on the road will be even though Ole Miss won at Alabama earlier this week.
“They haven’t lost at home yet. On some neutrals and road games, they’ve not scored that well. We’ve looked at all of their games, tried to see who’s done what well, and they’ve been doing a great job running the five-out with the bigs that can handle,” Oats said.
“You gotta do a good job, they’ve got good answers for defenses. Teams that have been able to — in some of the losses, they’ve looked like they weren’t quite in tune, some teams maybe a little more physical with them. We’ve got to get them out of rhythm a little bit.”
Oats said sometimes teams can get out of sync — even a team as good as the one Kentucky has.
“When you take as many 3;s as they do and as we do, sometimes you just miss shots. I don’t think we can just plan on them missing shots,” the Alabama coach aid. “We’re gonna have to cause them to miss, force them to turn the ball over and bring some intensity to the game that I don’t think we had on Tuesday (against Ole Miss).”
Oats was visibly frustrated with his team in the Ole Miss loss but admitted Friday it was good to have a chance to play again so soon,
“The next one here is not going to be an easy one, but at least we can play it pretty quick again,” Oats said. “Look, it’s not good to drop home games if you’re trying to win the league championship. We put ourselves in a hole and we’re gonna find out way to dig ourselves out of that hole, starting with a much better showing against Kentucky.”
Of course, he knows saying that is easier than doing it at Rupp Arena against a team that already has five wins over top 15 teams.
“Kentucky’s offense is currently second in the country in efficiency, third in the country in points per game. Coach Pope’s done a very good job kind of modernizing their offense,” Oats said.
“(He’s) done a good job, they run really good stuff, they’ve got good players. They’re appropriate players with a pretty good mix of everything.”
5 Responses
Over the years, it has been clear that the clearest path to an SEC regular season championship is to hold serve at home and win at least 1/2 of SEC road games. A home loss must be offset by an additional (unlikely) road win, and a home loss to a contender is usual fatal to SEC Championship hopes.
Here is the current ranking of the SEC teams after 4 games each. The NET value is the number of road wins minus the number of home losses. I have found this method of tracking provides a more realistic assessment of the conference race at any time during the season but especially during the first 1/2 of the season.
TEAM NET Value Home Loss Road Win
Auburn 2 0 2
Mississippi 2 0 2
Alabama 1 1 2
Kentucky 1 0 1
Missouri 1 0 1
Tennessee 1 0 1
Vanderbilt 0 1 1
Mississippi St. 0 1 1
Texas A&M 0 1 1
Georgia 0 0 0
Florida 0 1 1
LSU -1 1 0
Texas -1 2 1
South Carolina -2 2 0
Oklahoma -2 2 0
Arkansas -2 2 0
UK is playing well, and UK is very much in the hunt. But, it cannot maintain this status with a home loss to a contender, and today’s game against Alabama is an essential win to maintain SEC Championship hopes.
Bama wanted this win more than we did. The effort parts of the game…defense and rebounding were both won by Bama. Bama shot 10 points higher than their season average from the foul line. Bama having four guys 6’11 or taller was the edge in rebounding and created 4 more fouls with Oweh and Williams fouling out. Carr and Perry were no shows, Robinson and Brea were half shows. Bama shot 34 threes to our 27. You could tell that the Bama players thought they were better than us and the score proved them right. If we had taken 8 more threes, we win the game. We still haven’t embraced Pope ball. We got lucky with Florida. We tried to outscore Bama and came up short. Bama made 2 more three pointers…the difference in the game. Defense and rebounding will be the factors that keep us from a Final 4, unless we start taking more 3 point shots. Now we go to Nashville and Knoxville. It’s time to man up Cats.
And Tennessee lost in Nashville today
Loose balls around the baseline Bama was just quicker too.. 1 loss. No big deal..
Agree Grant. Just one of those games