Nate Oats: ‘Anything Short of a Final Four Would be a Disappointment’
When Alabama men’s basketball had what head coach Nate Oats called a “disgusting” loss to Ole Miss on Jan. 14, he mentioned that game over the next several press conferences.
The Crimson Tide has come a long way since then as it was just named the No. 2 seed in the East Region of the 2025 NCAA Tournament on Sunday. However, Alabama’s 104-82 blowout loss to Florida in the SEC Tournament semifinal on Saturday was the second time that the Tide have fallen to the Gators this season.
But unlike what followed after Ole Miss, Oats doesn’t have time to linger on the losses as he must turn those pages and focus on the neutral sit win-or-go-home matchups.
“The biggest difference is I’m not just happy to be in the NCAA Tournament right now,” Oats said during Sunday’s press conference. “We need to make a run. Getting to the tournament’s not good enough.”
The Crimson Tide reached its first Final Four in program history last season, but like this year, Alabama also fell to the Gators in the 2024 SEC Tournament and had a rough stretch at the end of the season. This obviously isn’t the ideal pattern to success, but now it’s all that Oats expects from his team.
“Anything short of a Final Four would be a disappointment in my opinion. That’s what the expectation is. I know we’re a 2-seed so the Elite Eight is supposed to be where it ends. If we don’t play well, play a lot a lot better than we did in the second half yesterday, we don’t make it that far.”
Oats is quite experienced in the NCAA Tournament as he first made the roughly three-week event back in the 2015-16 season when he was at Buffalo. He reached March Madness two more times with the Bulls before coming to Alabama for the 2019-20 season.
The Crimson Tide didn’t make the field of 68 during Oats’ first year but Alabama has done so in every season since. His belief in the team seems to increase every year and now he’s setting perhaps the highest bar.
“Expectation levels are a little bit different than they were nine years ago,” Oats said. “Still fortunate to be coaching at a Division-I level, but personally I’ve got higher expectations and the program here has higher expectations.”
2-seed Alabama will first play 15-seed Robert Morris on Friday in Cleveland, Ohio.
