Rat Poison, Underdogs, Blue Collars: Nate Oats Outlines Most Anticipated Season in Alabama Basketball History

The Crimson Tide head coach previews the upcoming season ahead of the program's first-ever Final Four banner ceremony.

Alabama head coach Nate Oats encourages his team against Connecticut during the Final Four semifinal game at State Farm Stadium. / Patrick Breen/The Republic / USA TODAY NETWORK

It's a monumental night for Alabama men's basketball. One of the most exciting evenings in the history of the program, and an opponent from another school won't even be there.

Tonight, head coach Nate Oats and the Crimson Tide will unveil and hoist the University's first-ever Final Four banner in the Coleman Coliseum rafters, whose ceiling is happy to welcome more additions in the future.

Since Oats' arrival, Alabama, the mecca of college football, has quickly become a basketball school as well, as the Tide has made the NCAA Tournament in each of the past four seasons, including two Sweet 16 appearances, and of course, last year's historic run to The Big Dance.

A strong argument can be made that this is the most anticipated season in the history of Tide Hoops. Head coach Nate Oats and his staff, several returning players, including First Team All-SEC point guard Mark Sears, multiple experienced transfers and highly touted incoming freshmen all give Alabama realistic expectations to get two more wins than last season's NCAA Tournament to claim the school's first-ever National Title.

On Monday, Oats admitted that this is "the best roster we've had since we've been here," and that the rest of the country thinks the same, as Alabama is widely expected to be a top-3 team when the AP Poll comes out. However, in a recent press conference, Oats stressed that the world's hype for Alabama is not part of his preseason message to the team and he's taken that out of a legendary Crimson Tide football head coach's playbook.

"Good thing is, we got coach [Nick] Saban still on campus, and they had a lot of outside noise around that program for a long time," Oats said in a recent press conference. "But he did an unbelievable job getting his guys to focus in without it. We may have him come speak to the team at some point, as he came to talk to our guys last year right before the Final Four run."

"[Saban] is always open to discuss with me, but I think he had the best term for it—Rat Poison. The more you listen to it, the more you eat the poison and you're going to die. If you listen to all the people tell us how great we are, and you start believing it, we're going to kill our competitive fire and walk into games thinking we deserve to win instead of actually earning the right to win the game."

Oats listed some methods to counter the rat poison, with the first being in the mindset of something Alabama won't be for a heavy majority of its games this upcoming season.

"We need to practice like we're the underdog, like we got a chip on our shoulder with the confidence knowing we're the better team going in," Oats said. "If we take care of business, play harder than the other team, move the ball, take care of ball handling, then the outcome will take care of itself, and just worry about the process of being the hardest playing team on the floor every night out. I think if you do that and eliminate the outside noise, then things will take care of itself."

For the past couple of years, Tide Hoops has been known for its fast-paced, heavy downtown shooting play style, and while this was certainly apparent at a recent practice that was open to the media, the speed and tempo were absolutely jaw-dropping as well. One would think that all Alabama did in practice was run nonstop without the ball, but Oats isn't a fan of this extremely common team-sport method of improvement.

"We're not big on conditioning on a track without a wall or just running sprints," Oats said. "To me, you get in shape to play basketball by playing basketball really hard. When you get tired, you keep playing really hard and push through it. Then your basketball conditioning, not your track and field conditioning, your basketball conditioning gets really good."

Throughout Oats' tenure, pure basketball conditioning has helped Alabama's offense dominate college basketball, as it's consistently one of the highest-scoring teams in the nation.

"We led the country in scoring last year, we've been top-10 in the country in scoring about every year I've been here, usually top five," Oats said. "There can be a little bit of the 'Hollywood' aspect to it, if you will—as fast as we play, as many threes as we take, we've broken multiple scoring records, multiple three-point records, both here, in the SEC and nationally. Recruits can get enamored with offense."

To quote Paul 'Bear' Bryant, an all-time-great former Alabama football head coach whose impact on the game is unsurmountable: "Offense sells tickets, but defense wins championships." Oats and his team may have had the best offense in the country over the past five years, but the defense has been relatively inconsistent. That said, history tells that the Crimson Tide gets closer to a National Championship when locking down opponents.

"We've had our best years when we've been ranked in the top-5 on defense. Our second year here, we were third in the country in defensive efficiency. We won the SEC regular season and tournament and made the Sweet 16. Our fourth year, we were third in the country in defensive efficiency. We won the SEC regular season and tournament. We were the No. 1 overall seed and made the Sweet 16.

"Last year, we did break through and make our first Final Four, but the year in general, up until we decided to actually guard somebody in March, wasn't what we're looking for. We have great seasons when we guard people."

Nevertheless, Alabama's defense throughout Oats' tenure has been better than in previous years and that's due to a variety of factors. But the former math teacher's love for analytics has led to the creation of the blue-collar scoring system.

Players are given a certain amount of non-scoreboard points for deflections, steals, blocks, rebounds, and loose balls. Offensive rebounds, diving on the floor and drawing fouls are also methods of gaining blue-collar points and whichever player tallies the most at the end of the game or practice is rewarded with a construction worker hard-hat. Oats is a big believer in this system and how the talent of this year's team could make the Tide's defense as threatening as the offense.

"We chart the blue-collar points every day in practice," Oats said. "We celebrate it, we talk about it, we explain it when they come in. The blue-collar mentality is about doing all the little things. You put your hard-hat on, you go to work every day, it's an everyday deal. That's what we're trying to get. We want practice to be as intense as it can possibly be every day."

"People that wear a hard hat or blue-collar workers, they have to bring it every day. They don't get to take days off when they don't feel well. They come into work and they work hard. We're going to come into work and we're going to work hard. It's not that we don't care about what's going on, we do care about our guys a lot off the court, but you got to be able to manage whatever off the court is to bring your best effort to work every day, like every blue-collar worker in America does, and that's what we're trying to get across these guys."

This unique coaching technique is certainly one to get used to for freshman and incoming transfers. This offseason, Alabama brought in four transfers and had four freshmen commit to the Crimson Tide. But as the season looms, big man Clifford Omoruyi, who transferred from Rutgers after leading the Big Ten in blocks last season, has grown accustomed to it and explained in a recent press conference that the Crimson Tide's up-and-coming defense and blue-collar mentality he saw in a practice prior to his decision were main reasons for the high-profile player's commitment.

"I know I could bring my defense," Omoruyi said. "When I came here, I saw everybody gets back and is good at defense. [At Rutgers] they don't play defense, but when I came here, I was like 'Wow!' Everybody plays defense here and I like that."

The aforementioned Mark Sears, who has All-American expectations written all over him ahead of his third season at Alabama, has taken notice of Omoruyi's immediate impact down low, as he seems to fit the blue-collar bill already.

"Going up against him in practice is tough," Sears said in a recent press conference. "Once you go by your man, you gotta worry about the big man protecting the rim. It's much harder to finish at the rim and go over him. But to have him on the same team, as a guard, you're able to get up to the ball and not worry about getting beat because you have somebody right there to protect you."

After finishing last season as an All-SEC First Team member and a Consensus Second Team All-American, Sears had the option to go to the next stage which is the NBA Draft. However, the 22-year-old couldn't resist what was being built in Tuscaloosa while he was watched from afar during the draft process.

"I saw the roster that coaching staff put together and I was like 'this roster can contend for a National Championship,' and I want to be a part of it."

The quest for Alabama men's basketball's first National Championship begins tonight, as immediately after the 2023-24 Final Four banner is lifted into the Coleman Coliseum rafters, Oats and the Crimson Tide are solely focused on getting those two extra wins.