It may be March, but it feels like Groundhog Day for Nate Oats and Alabama basketball

Winter, slumbering in the open air, wears on its smiling face a dream… of spring.” – Phil Connors, Groundhog Day (1993).

Alabama basketball fans are no strangers to Groundhog Day. In all four years of the Avery Johnson era, Alabama was exactly 17-12 through the first 29 games of the season. If you go back to the final year of the Anthony Grant era, that streak extended to five full years.

Prior to Nate Oats’ arrival in Tuscaloosa, Alabama was perpetually the same team every year: a thoroughly mediocre bubble team that more times than not finished on the wrong side of that bubble and ended up in the NIT instead of the NCAA Tournament.

Things have drastically changed under Oats. He’s in year six at Alabama and has led the Crimson Tide to a Final Four and won two regular season and two SEC Tournament titles in that span. He’ll lead Alabama to a top two seed in the NCAA Tournament for just the fifth time in program history, the third time in his six year tenure at the Capstone.

Complaining about how this season has gone, as a lifelong Alabama basketball fan, feels, well, silly. I remember hoping and praying for a consistent tournament team. Oats has raised the bar so much that just making the Big Dance isn’t enough. Just being a 2-seed in the tournament isn’t enough. This team entered the year with national title aspirations and they’ve underachieved those lofty expectations.

And while this version of Groundhog Day isn’t as severe as the end of the Grant era and the entirety of the Johnson one, this Crimson Tide team is stuck in the same time loop that last season’s was.

Going into late February of last season, Alabama held an 11-2 mark in SEC play and controlled its own destiny in the race for an SEC regular season crown. From there, the Crimson Tide went 2-4 over its next six games, including a one-and-done performance in the SEC Tournament. They saw their SEC championship hopes go up in flames and any hopes of a deep run in the NCAA Tournament seemed, at the time, far-fetched.

This year, Alabama won 10 of its first 11 games in conference play and went into a home matchup with Auburn on February 15th with first place in the league – and the No. 1 overall ranking in the AP Poll – on the line. Alabama lost that game, and has proceeded to go 2-4 in its last six games with one regular season game remaining on Saturday on the Plains against an Auburn team that has had the season most Crimson Tide fans were hoping for in Tuscaloosa.

Alabama came up short in its first goal of winning the SEC regular season title. They will still get a double bye in the SEC Tournament, thanks to Missouri’s loss at Oklahoma and to no credit of their own after losing to a Florida team that bullied them at Coleman Coliseum.

I’m not the only one who has taken note of the similarities to the finish of the season between this year’s team and last year’s. Oats was asked about it after Wednesday’s loss and had this to say:

“I thought guys quit last year at times. … I don’t think that’s the case here. We didn’t have enough pop, but we fought hard. … I thought they continued to fight. I would anticipate us being a lot better Saturday at Auburn. I don’t think this group has any quit in them.”

Oats’ comments after a loss makes this feel even more like Groundhog Day. He has frequently this year repeated the line of anticipating the team to play better in its next game. Some version of that has come out of Oats’ mouth after every loss this season except for last weekend’s buzzer beating defeat at Tennessee.

Oats has never shied away from high expectations. Prior to the start of this season, Oats spoke about how he anticipated a special season for this group.

And to be fair, this season is not over with yet. Alabama is not playing bad basketball right now. They played poorly in the loss to Missouri, but they competed against Auburn and were let down by poor shot making. They played extremely hard in Knoxville just to be let down by poor execution at the end of both halves.

On Wednesday, they were beaten by a better team. But part of that was effort related as the Gators dominated the Crimson Tide on the glass and won the vast majority of the 50-50 balls.

The ceiling for this team is probably lower than we all hoped. Expectations probably should have been adjusted when Latrell Wrightsell tore his Achillies in Las Vegas. He was one of the most important players on this team and losing him was a bigger blow than anyone wanted to admit.

This team probably can’t win a national championship. They probably aren’t on the same level as Auburn, Duke, or Florida. They probably aren’t on the same level as Houston, either, without Wrightsell, at least. The Tide did beat the Cougars on a neutral floor but that was with a healthy Wrightsell.

But, like last year, this team could flip the switch defensively and get on a hot shooting run that leads to a second consecutive berth in the Final Four, which is not something that should be sneezed at for a program that had never made it that far until a year ago.

If Alabama basketball fans are destined to be stuck in some form of a time loop with this program, the version where the team makes the Final Four is much more appealing than the 17-12 doldrums of the Grant/Johnson eras.