Nate Oats on Dropping Fifth Straight to Tennessee: “Not Good”

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Saturday evening, Alabama Men's Basketball dropped its fifth straight matchup against the Tennessee Volunteers. This time in Tuscaloosa, to the tune of a 79-73 final thanks to a 29-point performance by Volunteer star forward Nate Ament.

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"Not good, they're really good, and we haven't been good enough." Said Alabama head coach Nate Oats after falling to the Vols for the fifth straight time. "The one up there really hurt last year. I've got a lot of respect for coach Barnes; he's one of the best to do it in the last 20, 30 years of college basketball. He's done a really good job against us and we've got to do a better job of prepping our guys. Felt they made really good adjustments in the second half [...] I didn't do a good enough job of getting our guys ready."

"When I first got in the league, we had some success against them, but here lately — and we've been pretty good, I mean, we've been one of the better teams in the league the last two, three years — but for whatever reason, we haven't much success against them."

The last time the Crimson Tide defeated Tennessee was in 2021, when Alabama won 73-68 off the back of Noah Gurley's 20 points off the bench, followed by Jahvon Quinerly with 18 and Jaden Shackleford with 12.

Nate Oats added that the difficulty with Tennessee is its style of play, particularly on defense:

"It has a lot to do with the way they guard. They're tough, physical; they make it hard when they take away the threes. We've got to have a better plan on offense. But on defense, we've got to do a better job, particularly rebounding the ball. They emphasize toughness, physicalty and we've got to do a better job of countering that."

The Crimson Tide makes the follow-up trip to Knoxville on February 28, hoping to avoid a sixth straight loss to the Volunteers.

"We'll get them up there, and hopefully we're better prepared to play them up there than this time at home," commented Oats.

Alabama stays in Tuscaloosa on Tuesday as they welcome the Missouri Tigers to Coleman Coliseum and hope to pick up their first home win since the SEC opener against Kentucky.

For more Alabama Baseball, Basketball, and Football content from Simon Besnoy, follow him on Twitter at @SimonBesnoy and stay tuned to Tide1009.com for daily news.