College basketball’s biggest national story has probably been Purdue going from unranked to No. 1 while being led by Zach Edey, a former sub-400 high school prospect who is now the front-runner to be everybody’s player of the year. Meantime, in the SEC, Kentucky has received most of the attention because the Wildcats are shockingly disappointing for the second time in a three-year span.
Those two stories — the positive Purdue story and the negative Kentucky story — have led to Alabama largely being a secondary topic both throughout the country and in its own league. But that should start to change immediately because, whether most realize it or not, Nate Oats’ program is turning in a historically great conference run that continued Saturday afternoon with a 77-69 victory at Auburn.
Alabama is now 12-0 in the SEC.
That’s 12-0 with lots and lots of blowouts.
Incredibly, Alabama is winning league games by an average of 21.1 points. Only two of its league games have been decided by single-digits. The Crimson Tide have beaten Kentucky by 26 points, Florida by 28 points and Vanderbilt by 57 points. They’re treating the SEC the way the great Gonzaga teams have regularly treated the WCC and operating on a separate level than everybody else in the conference.
“Our team is playing good basketball right now,” Auburn coach Bruce Pearl said after the loss to Alabama. “We’re playing well. We’re just not playing well enough to beat the best team in the country.”
Interesting quote from BP.
You don’t usually hear a coach so willingly call his in-state rival the “best team in the country” when it’s ranked (slightly) lower than first in most human polls and computers. Still, it’s easy to understand why Pearl feels that way because nobody is overwhelming quality opponents the way Alabama is doing it.
Before anybody asks, no, I will not jump No. 2 Alabama over No. 1 Purdue in Sunday’s Top 25 And 1 because Purdue still has the nation’s best body of work. That said, nobody in the nation — not even Purdue — is consistently destroying opponents like Alabama. So if Alabama gets some first-place votes in Monday’s AP Top 25 poll, hey, it’s fine with me. I get it. The Crimson Tide are undeniably awesome.
How awesome?
Consider that the last team to start 12-0 in the SEC was the 2015 Kentucky squad with future NBA All-Stars Karl-Anthony Towns and Devin Booker. Those Wildcats won their SEC games by an average of 16.7 points. Again, this Alabama team is winning its SEC games by an average of 21.1 points.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting Alabama is better than that Kentucky team. I’m just highlighting the fact that Alabama is crushing SEC opponents more convincingly than that Kentucky team crushed SEC opponents, and that UK team is one of the best teams to ever fall short of a national championship.
Which begs the question: What happened to Alabama in the SEC/Big 12 Challenge?
It was just two weeks ago when the Crimson Tide went on the road and lost 93-69 to an Oklahoma team that’s 65th in the NET and 2-10 in the Big 12. It made no sense then and makes less sense now.
Oats was asked about it Saturday.
“I feel like we didn’t take Oklahoma as seriously as we needed to, for whatever reason,” he said. “That’s why we didn’t play as hard as we needed to.”
Fair enough.
Where this goes from here, it’s impossible to say. But what’s clear is that Alabama is on track to secure a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament for the first time ever and by extension obviously good enough to make its first Final Four or even win its first national championship. The Crimson Tide have a great coach with modern principles in Oats, a future top-five NBA Draft pick in Brandon Miller and enough talented pieces around him that a guy who was the Most Outstanding Player of the 2021 SEC Tournament (Jahvon Quinerly) is now just their sixth-leading scorer.
Is Alabama really the best team in the country like Pearl said?
That’s hard to say for sure.
But what’s easy to say is that nobody is better equipped — based on a combination of personnel and style of play — than the Crimson Tide to bury a fellow quality team. They might not win every game going forward, but it should surprise nobody if Alabama wins the very last one that’s played this season.
