re: Purdue 87 @ Alabama 80 Final - ESPN2

Philon played terrible and they killed us on the boards. It was still close all the way. I'll take it. It's not like we played our A game and lost by double digits. Better to lose to them than play over matched teams and learn nothing.

That being said..I need Philon to play better against guys who will be designing bridges and shite in 2 years

Bristow will help. Sherrell needs to quit being a pussy and grow a pair. He is too big to be getting bullied like he does

Long post warning as I just finished watching the recording of the 2nd half and here are some thoughts:

1) the worst performance in this game was the announcers…and it wasn’t close. One gem was saying Williamson had not hit a 3 all year when we all watched him hit the 3 in the 1H. Absolutely atrocious!

2) coming into the season many of us said the front court was our weakness. 52 to 28 on rebounds is why we lost this game

3) there was about a 3 minute stretch midway through the 2nd half that turned the momentum. Jemison missed 3 wide open 3s and Holloway had a terrible foul at half court while we were up 4 to put Smith on the FT line. Smith hit both to cut it to 2 and then hit a 3 not too long after that. We continued to battle, but those plays were the turning point and we were fighting to get back the rest of the way (which we did at 80 but couldn’t close…should have been playing with a lead if just 2 of those 4 plays go differently)

4) playing very fast and shooting a ton of 3s can be a bad combination in the last 10-12 minutes of games if our guys’ legs are tired. If we’re going to play that style, you have to have the depth to keep shooters’ legs under them. Holloway missed 2 in a row that were way short indicating tired legs, and others were off as well (Mallette missed 2 in a row before hitting a big one and TBB missed short to seal the loss).

5) I rarely criticize Oats as he’s so good, but the 2 things he’s been consistently bad at are timeout use and late game substitutions (offense to defense and vice versa). Philon got fouled at 1:16 left with us down 2 and him going to FT line. We had 3 timeouts left and we know Purdue uses a ton of clock on their possessions. Nate should have put our 5 best defenders on the court as a stop was crucial in the next possession even if Philon made both, and an absolute must if he missed (which he did). The next time we’d be on offense would be around 45-50 seconds left and you could use a TO to get your offense back on the court while still having 2 timeouts left. He left a small, bad defensive line up on the court that couldn’t get rebounds (TBB was the tallest on the floor with 4 guards/wings). We ended up fouling smith at 48 seconds and that pretty much sealed the game after TBB missed a corner 3 short on the next possession (refer back go #4). Oats has to get better at late game situations…it can literally be the difference between winning and losing a close game like this.

Overall a hard fought game and I was proud of the team. I felt like we played close to our ceiling in the SJ game and was expecting a bit of reversion from that game, which is what happened. Other than rebounding, we played pretty well and this is something we can build off of. Ok, long post over and Roll Tide

I remeber the season we beat gonzaga, baylor, and Houston. We lost to notre dame in March.

Games like this make me hope that Oats doesn’t get an itch and will wait out the roster lotto. He’s going to have a year eventually where we find the right kind of length for his system, experienced guards, and at least one guy who is an NBA caliber scorer. He had that in 2023 but bad injury luck got us. I don’t think we have the championship level mix this year but I do think they have the tools to defend better on the perimeter than the last two if they keep on working at it. It’s the rebounding that seems to be the backbreaker. They’re gonna have to shoot better than they did against Purdue to win against quality rosters 1 through 5.

I agree with everything you said. My issue the game was how can they call so many tick tack fouls for Braden and Philon was getting absolutely hacked and didn’t receive many calls.

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Tough game. Honestly, it's amazing it was close with the rebounding discrepancy.

Purdue is the kind of team that will always be difficult for Bama's style. But, I think they'll have a better chance later in the year, when the team has learned more about themselves, and when (hopefully) we get our injured/medical mystery big guys back.

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I think we might have a higher ceiling as a team than Purdue does because of all the new/young pieces, but our frontcourt is still very...not good at the moment.

This. We have more room to grow and as it stands in November.... we already can go toe to toe with the #2 team in the nation.

We tied 80-80 with near a minute to go, and the shots just stopped falling, that's basketball. The more steady team with upperclassmen pulled away at the last minute.

Learn and progress.