Oats Emphasizes Pounding Glass

Before we get into the logistics of Nate Oats' Tuesday media avail, a little humor:

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When the press conference concluded, a media member showed Oats the below shot chart which almost perfectly followed Oats' mantra of shooting three's and shots in the paint.

Oats and Tide hoops junkies know "what's wrong with that picture." It's the small dot indicating the two-point jumper Latrell Wrightsell took with hit foot on the 3-point line.

Oats response to that glitch? "Numbnuts," he laughed. But overall, he loved the shot chart, saying, "Wow that's pretty isn't it?"

OK, back to business. No. 13 Alabama welcomes No. 24 Florida to Coleman Coliseum Wednesday for a 6 PM CT tip, and due to baseball you can hear hoops only on 95.3 The Bear. This is the first time the teams have met with both ranked since 2007.

“It’s good for us,” Oats said. “It’s good for our fans to have a home game like this with two top-25 teams. It’s good for the SEC. But we’re going to have to play well to win.”

Bama will also have to play well to keep its one-game lead in the SEC standings.

The Crimson Tide (18-7, 10-2 SEC) has won two straight by scoring an average of 104.5 points per game.

Rebounding and second chance shots were issues in Saturday's 25-point win over TAMU, and could be again. Texas A&M tops America with 18 offensive rebounds per game. Who’s No. 2? Florida with 16.12.

“We didn’t do a great job keeping A&M off the glass. We’ve got to do a better job against Florida,” Oats said. “They’re going to have to guard us, too. We’ve got the No. 1 offense in the country. They’re going to play two bigs. One of their bigs is going to have to guard a guard, and we’ll see how that goes.

“We’ve got to do a better job rebounding, and they’re going to have to figure out how to guard our guards. So it’ll be kind of a two-different-styles matchup.”

The Gators lead the nation in rebounding rate (44.16 rpg) and have three of the SEC’s top 10 rebounders entering the final three weeks of the regular season.

Florida has won seven of its last eight games, including three straight, and Oats said Bama will continue to emphasize rebounding while preaching three points.

Oats noted, “We’ve got to turn them over more, so there’s less shots to get rebounds. We didn’t do a great job against A&M with that. We need to keep them off the glass. We didn’t do a good job of that – they had 26 O boards. But we also said when they do get a rebound, they don’t get points for it. We’ve still got to get stops.

“To give up 26 O boards and to only get out-scored by five, I think, on second-chance points was not bad. So I did think we did a decent job still getting stops. Anderson Garcia [of TAMU] had eight offensive rebounds and only scores three points total. We did a decent job continuing to play, guard, not being deflated when you give up an O board. We’re going to have to do that.”

“Now, hopefully, the 26 O boards we gave up against A&M get significantly reduced and hopefully the turnovers, we can turn up. But [Zyon] Pullin, their point guard, is No. 2 in the country in assist-to-turnover ratio. He doesn’t turn the ball over very much.

“It’s not like this is a team that comes in turning it over a lot. But if we could turn our pressure up with our guard guarding one of their bigs, hopefully, we can pressure a little bit more. We’ve got to do a better job with that.”