Alabama Basketball Not Looking Past Regular-Season Finale at Texas A&M

Despite clinching the 1-seed in next week's SEC Tournament, Nate Oats said that the Crimson Tide still has a lot to play for.

Joey Blackwell | Mar 3, 2023

Alabama Basketball Not Looking Past Regular-Season Finale at Texas A&M /

In this story:

Alabama Crimson Tide

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Alabama basketball might have clinched the status of SEC regular season champions with its win over Auburn on Wednesday night, but Nate Oats and the Crimson Tide aren't planning on easing up just yet.

On Saturday morning, No. 2 Alabama is set to face No. 24 Texas A&M at Bryan-College Station. Since Oats arrived in Tuscaloosa back in 2019, the Crimson Tide has an 0-2 record against the Aggies. Even more interesting is the fact that Oats has yet to travel to play at Texas A&M due to the teams' 2020-21 matchup that was cancelled due to an outbreak of severe winter weather preventing the game from happening.

The game was initially postponed, but an outbreak of a different nature — this time COVID-19 — kept Texas A&M and Alabama from settling on a makeup date before season's end.

"This is kinda crazy, right?" Oats said during his pregame press conference on Friday. "This is year four and this is our first trip to College Station? I mean we know — we're expecting a raucous crowd. We've had raucous crowds all year."

Alabama's win over Auburn signified the Crimson Tide's 16th conference win of the season, tying its previous record for most conference wins in a single season. The 16 wins is also the number of regular-season SEC wins that the team was able to reach back in the 2020-21 season that saw Alabama win the SEC Tournament on top of the regular-season crown.

A win on Saturday has much more implications than setting a new program record, though. Alabama is still a 1-seed in the vast majority of bracket projections out there. However, a loss at Texas A&M — if coupled with a poor performance in Nashville — could put that status in jeopardy.

It's a long shot, but Oats believes it's better to play safe than sorry.

"We do have an important game tomorrow," Oats said. "People have asked, 'Is there anything to play for?' because we've already got the SEC championship wrapped up. My answer to that is we do have a lot to play for. We've talked repeatedly about playing our best basketball at the end of the season. We need to be better tomorrow than we were on Wednesday. There's plenty of areas to improve.

"Seventeen wins would be a program record, so our guys are competitors, they've got a lot of pride to play for and we're still playing for NCAA Tournament seeding, too."

Failing to look past games has been a strength of Alabama this season and can be attributed to the team's mindset. Not just the players, but the coaches as well. However, the game in College Station isn't going to be the easiest of environments to play in.

"There's a lot of tough places to play in the SEC and being what our ranking's been for the large majority of year, we've been in some tough environments and expect another one tomorrow," Oats said.

Joey Blackwell is an award-winning journalist and assistant editor for BamaCentral and has covered the Crimson Tide since 2018. He primarily covers Alabama football, men's basketball and baseball, but also covers a wide variety of other sports. Joey earned his bachelor's degree in History from Birmingham-Southern College in 2014 before graduating summa cum laude from the University of Alabama in 2020 with a degree in News Media. He has also been featured in a variety of college football magazines, including Lindy's Sports and BamaTime.

See Also: