There was a time, not too long ago, that Kentucky basketball was spoken of in reverence in these hallowed halls.
The bluest of blue bloods, Big Blue Nation literally owned SEC basketball. Conference up? Conference down? Doesn’t matter… Kentucky was the straw that stirs the proverbial drink in the SEC. It just means more in Lexington and all that.
There was a time, not too long ago, that weekends at the SEC Tournament meant said Big Blue Nation would take over entire hotel lobbies and arenas – regaling anyone within earshot not only of Rupp’s glorious past but Calipari and Co.’s glorious previous decade.
Now? Well, now is different.
Once a bully of the sport itself, Kentucky has been passed in the SEC order of things. Alabama proved that point with authority Friday night in Nashville, dispatching the Wildcats 99-70 and sending Big Blue Nation to the concierge desk asking for expedited check-outs.
How dominant were the Crimson Tide on Friday night against one of the pillars of the sport? Consider…
The 29-point beatdown was Kentucky’s worst loss to Alabama in the rivalry’s history.
The 29-point beatdown was Kentucky’s worst loss in SEC Tournament history… by 12 points.
The 29-point beatdown was Kentucky’s worst loss this season.
The 29-point beatdown was just another beatdown in Alabama’s epic basketball run.
Crimson Tide coach Nate Oats has not only assembled a program worthy of envy in Tuscaloosa, he has done it in the literal shadow of the Death Star known as Alabama football. That’s no small feat, given that the amount of oxygen that Nick Saban’s Joyless Murderball sucked out of the environment before Saban bequeathed the program to Kalen DeBoer.
What happens to said Death Star now that DeBoer has the keys is a column or 10 for another day, but the point remains that Oats has the Tide wandering yet again close to the edge of a precipice few have ever been.
Only 10 Division 1 schools have won national championships in football and basketball: Ohio State, Syracuse, Maryland, Michigan State, California, Florida, Arkansas, Michigan, Stanford, and UCLA. That’s it. But in the past 50 years, that list narrows to just 2 – Michigan (1989 and 2023) and Florida (1996, 2006 and 2008 for football and 2006 and 2007 for men’s basketball).
That is the kind of rarified air that Oats and the Crimson Tide are breathing at the moment. And the catalyst behind it is the level of offensive relentlessness that would have made John Wooden gasp in wonderment.
Alabama leads the nation in scoring at 91.4 points per game, 4.6 better than the next best offense (Gonzaga). The Tide have eclipsed the 100-point threshold 9 times already, and are piling up the points even though their top scorer – guard Mark Sears – is barely in the nation’s top 40 in scoring at 19.0 points per game.
What the Tide don’t do is play defense, at least not all that well. At 81.1 points per game allowed, Alabama’s scoring defense is ranked 346th out of 355 Division 1 teams. Which is also what makes Friday’s blowout victory over Kentucky notable – simply holding a top-20 team to 70 points has to feel like a complete performance.
Oats has made no secret that he values analytics in building this Crimson Tide juggernaut. The former high school math teacher relies on a small army of numbers geeks behind the bench to judge every facet of his Alabama team’s performance – and succeeded Friday night despite several of them being absent.
“The guys that run our analytics box score, two of them got the flu while we were here, so we got some subs in. So I don’t even have that in front of me,” Oats said to the postgame media scrum. “I don’t even know how many possessions we had. None of my analytics box scores are in front of me. Our subs in the analytics were not as good as our subs in the game.”
It’s a brave new world out here, and Oats and the Tide are leading the way. Which is why Friday night felt more than a little bit like a 40-minute torch passing from one generation to the next. I’m relatively sure Adolph Rupp didn’t study analytics box scores while on the bench any more than Nolan Richardson considered advanced metrics while concocting his 40 Minutes of Hell.
But those guys are in the history books. The Crimson Tide is today’s news, and is poised to make plenty more noise in March.
An APSE national award-winning writer and page designer, David Wasson has almost four decades of experience in the print journalism business in Florida and Alabama. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and several national magazines and websites. His Twitter handle: @JustDWasson.
