When Nate Oats took charge of the Alabama Crimson Tide men’s basketball program early in 2019, he promised an offensive style few—if anyone—had ever seen in the SEC before.
Oats, the former high school math teacher turned rising coaching star, pitched Tide fans on a fast-paced offense built on transition baskets and plenty of made threes. Oats’s last team, the Buffalo Bulls, which had earned a near-unprecedented No. 6 seed in the NCAA tournament, took threes as more than 44% of their total shot attempts. Only one SEC team had even topped a 40% three-point rate in the previous 20 years: the ’07 Florida Gators team that won the national championship under Billy Donovan.
Unkept promises of aesthetically pleasing, fast-paced teams are a staple in introductory news conferences. Oats, however, was serious, and over the next four years he built one of the most dynamic offenses in the country on the principles of pace and space that have taken over the NBA. It helped him land a future No. 2 overall NBA draft pick in Brandon Miller, lead the Tide to a pair of SEC regular-season and tournament championships and even secure the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA tournament in his fourth season in Tuscaloosa.
