Alabama Looks to Avoid Letdown Against Missouri

The Alabama Crimson Tide certainly have had some big wins early on in this young season. However, they have also taken several steps back against teams they should have beaten, and now they will look to avoid doing just that tomorrow night on the road against Missouri.

After back-to-back huge wins over Gonzaga and Houston last month, Alabama came out completely flat at Memphis and it showed in the final score, with the Tide losing to a team that head coach Nate Oats felt they should have beaten.

"We've had three games that we've lost that we were the better team in and should have won and didn't come with the energy needed to win," Oats said Friday. "Iona is a good team, well-coached, good talent, but we should have won that game. Memphis was coming off a four-game losing streak, tons of talent, playing with their backs against the wall and played a lot harder than we did. Davidson is well-coached with a lot of shooters but we feel like in all those games if we got a rematch we'd win the game. But you only get one shot."

Now, coming off two huge wins again, this time to start conference play with wins against Tennessee and Florida, Alabama has an opportunity to get off to an extremely strong 3-0 start in conference play against a significantly inferior Missouri team.

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The Tigers are 6-7 to start the season and have only played one conference game so far due to a recent COVID outbreak within the program, a blowout loss to Kentucky.

With an extremely difficult matchup against Auburn coming up next followed by a road test against Mississippi State and then LSU back at home, the Tide must handle Missouri and not get caught looking ahead to the tough month that lies before them.