Alabama head coach Nate Oats met with media in Chicago ahead of the Sweet Sixteen matchup with Michigan on Friday night. During his time speaking with reporters, Oats talked up the Wolverines by calling them “physically imposing” and “a different deal” from the teams they’ve played. He also had great things to say about Michigan head coach Dusty May, whom he’s known for quite a long time.
Here’s all that Oats had to say about the Wolverines, as well as a few of their players at the very end, courtesy
of ASAP Sports.
NATE OATS: It’s good to be back. We were fortunate to play in this building already. They got us in the same locker room when we were here, shoot, back whenever it was. We walked in, I thought which season did we play here because it feels like it was a couple seasons ago already. So we’ve been through quite a bit since that Illinois game.
But it’s good to be back. Sometimes it’s good to remind yourself how good you played at different times.
I think some of our non-conference road games prepared us for this moment. Go to the first week of the season, go to St. John’s, they’re still alive, look like one of the best teams in the country. Got a road game at Madison Square Garden. You come to Illinois, play them, it wasn’t technically a road game because Illinois doesn’t play their home games here, but I would call it a semi-road game, pretty close to a road game. We were able to get a win here.
Now Michigan is a different deal. I mean, they’re physically imposing. There’s not too many holes on Michigan’s team. Their front line is as good as any front line in college basketball in recent history. Their backcourt is very good. Obviously they’ve gotta Nimari who played for us who was part of a lot of big wins. Love Nimari. He’s a great kid. He’s their best shooter. He’s playing well. So it’s not like they’re like a non-shooting court.
Elliott is their point guard. We did play against him at Carolina and we played him a certain way that game. He’s drastically improved his shooting. I don’t think you can play him the same way we did two years ago. I think he’ll hurt you that way. A lot of credit to him.
Look, I’m a high school coach that has gone all in on player development, both in the high school ranks and in college. And I think you’ve always got to give guys a chance to improve. He may play a particular player one year, and then the next, you’ve got to take into account the fact they’ve had an entire off-season with him. He’s had two off-seasons. So he’s worked hard on holes in his game, and I don’t think you can play him the way we played him when he was at Carolina.
So a lot of credit to him, a lot of credit to the Michigan coaching staff on developing him into a shooter. This team is good. Yaxel, one of the best players in the country. Played right in our home state at UAB where we knew about him. Michigan did a good job to get him.
He’s super versatile. They kind of start him at the 3, moves down to the 4. Their 3, 4, and 5 could start anybody in the country, and they’re good. They’re going to make it hard to finish in the paint. These teams have got real rim protectors that try to build out on our 3s. We’ve got to be very exacting, if you will, precise, locked in on how we’re going to get our threes.
We obviously take a lot of threes. Somebody showed me a stat. I’ve gotten to be pretty good friends with Joe Mazzulla. I think they had the highest three-point rate in the NBA, 53.6, and we’re at 53.9. The Celtics last year obviously taken a lot of threes. So these teams that come in to guard us are going to try to take away the three. And Michigan has got a team that’s pretty capable of doing it, because they’ve got rim protection.
We’re going to have to be smart, thorough, focused, locked in on how we execute our offense. Because a lot of times these teams take bad shots, and it results in transition buckets the other way on Michigan because they’ve got elite rim protection. So when we do get to the rim and they’ve got a rim protector there, we’re going to have to make smart reads because they’re also going to try to take away our reads.
Michigan is a top 10 offense and defense and they’re going to be hard to beat. I do think we can compete with them. I thought that game against Texas Tech, who by the way is a very good team — I’m also pretty good friends with T.J. Otzelberger. Actually I’m good friends with all three of those coaches here in Chicago. I’ve got as much respect for Rick as anybody in our league and I’ve gotten to know him really well. Love Rick.
I’ve known T.J. since he played at UW-Whitewater and I coached at UW-Whitewater right after he got done playing. And then I’ve known Dusty for 20-plus years. He actually helped give me my first job in Division I. I know all these guys.
But Tech went to Iowa State and won at Iowa State — and Iowa State is one of the best teams in country — without Toppin. So we played a very good Texas Tech team and played pretty well against them. So I think we’re playing our best basketball and have to play even significantly a lot better than to beat Michigan. But I do think we’re presenting in the right direction at the right time like we’ve tended to do here in this program.
I think we’ve got our guys locked in, ready to go. We’re going to have to execute the game plan. We’re going to have to make some shots. We’re going to have to take care of the ball. We’re going to have to find a way to rebound. If we do that, we’re going to have a chance to beat this team.
Q. What do you remember about your impressions of Dusty when you first met him, and what stood out to you about him?
NATE OATS: First off is that he was a great guy. My start in this business is a little bit different than a lot of guys that are in my shoes. I was a Division II player at Maranatha. I coached there. My dad is still a professor there. He’s two hours from here. He’s driving down. He’s from Illinois. Used to come down here to Illinois to my grandparents’ house in Pekin all the time growing up. I was able to watch WGN every time I’d come down, so I’m familiar with here.
But I used to go to all these college practices, so I got to meet college coaches. I went from Maranatha to Whitewater where Otzelberger played, them I went to Romulus and I got to know all the college coaches that came through my gym, and it was hundreds of them. Some of them you could tell were using you to try to get your players. Some of them you could tell were great guys that were not using you to get to your players, and they were actually trying to build a genuine relationship with you.
Dusty was one of those guys that was genuine, real, smart, and worked hard. He was an assistant at Eastern Michigan when I knew him. He was the manager at Indiana. I liked him. I went over — I tried to go to Michigan practices, Eastern, all this. We got to be very close because we were both young basketball junkies trying to learn every which way possible.
Got to know him when he was at Eastern, liked him. He moved around. Stayed in touch with him. I stayed at Romulus. When he was an assistant under Mike White at Louisiana Tech, they recruited a kid of mine, Leo Edwards, who went there from Romulus. So Leo goes down to Louisiana Tech, he stays with Mike. I get the chance to go with Bobby Hurley while Bobby Hurley got hired by Danny White, who was Tennessee’s AD that’s here. Now Danny talks to Mike White and Dusty about me, then Bobby goes on.
Two years later, I get a chance to interview for that job at Buffalo and Mike White calls — sorry — Danny White calls Mike White, I think Dusty was involved with that a little bit. So he was a part of me getting my first head job in Division I.
As a matter of fact, Dusty spoke at our clinic. We do this clinic where we bring in NBA head coaches, NBA assistants, which I think is the best clinic in college basketball. My assistant Ryan Pannone helped start it, put it together. We do it every year. It will be great this August.
Dusty came down and spoke at it this last year. He said, look, if you need me to speak, I’ll speak, but I’d really like to just come and learn. Because he learns a lot. I think he’s one of the best coaches in college basketball. It’s not one of these games where we’re going in and they’ve got a lot of talent and we think we can just out-coach a poorly-coached talented team. Michigan is very talented and very well-coached.
I think Dusty has not let his ego — he’s the same guy that I knew as assistant at Eastern Michigan. With all the success he’s had, his ego hasn’t gotten any bigger, and I think that speaks a lot to the character of the guy. I’m still friends with him. I’m sure we’ll talk after the game. Actually he texted me last night and asked what hotel we were staying at. I thought we were staying next to him. I didn’t talk to him about our basketball game. I talked to him about other stuff.
Q. I wonder if you could go back to your opening. You talked about Yaxel. Was there any conversations or detail to the connotations that you might have had with Yaxel in the transfer portal? Secondly, how do you plan on defending him tomorrow night?
NATE OATS: He was at UAB. We did make a call. It never got very deep. I think there were some programs that were in a little deeper with a lot more money at the time. It’s one of those, you kind of call, see where the situation is at. Probably wasn’t something we were going to be able to do, so didn’t spend a lot of time on it.
I knew Michigan would have been involved pretty heavily early, and I made a call to Dusty. We’ve ended up recruiting the same guys a few different times. He’s pretty open and honest with me, I’m pretty open and honest with him. And we didn’t go very far. It wasn’t for lack of thinking he wasn’t a very good player. He was the best player in the portal.
To get to where you defend him, well, you’re going to have to hope he misses some shots because he’s a super athletic basketball player with a lot of size that’s playing the 3 and the 4 for them. So at the 3 he kind of overpowers you. At the 4, he still overpowers you, but he’s a little quicker. So you’re going to have to guard him with guys that are big enough, strong enough, and athletic enough, and there’s not many of those so you’re going to have to get some help from teammates on the floor.
Typically we’ve switched 1 through 4 or at least 1 through 3 all year. I’m not sure you want to switch small guards on to him. You may have to. Then you’re just going to have to figure out what to do with him when they go in the post.
Dusty is good. He knows what he’s got. He puts him in good spots. I’m going to say this: This is not a game where you can guard a lot of these guys one-on-one because you’re going to lose the one-on-one.
Against most good teams, you’ve got to figure out what you can give up because you’re not taking away everything. So we can’t take away all their rim shots, take away all their drives, take away all their threes, take away all their post-ups. You’ve got to give something up. So you’ve got to figure out what it is that makes the most sense to give up.
We obviously don’t want Yaxel posting us and we don’t want him driving. So we’ve got to figure out what — you’re going to have to give him something. We’re going to have to get a lot of help.
But we’ve got guys with size, some toughness, some competitiveness about them that I think will do a good job. And doing a good job on him is probably not holding him scoreless, making him take tough shots. He’s going to make some of them. You can’t give him anything easy.
Our whole thing with these guys is whatever they get that we choose to give up, it can’t be easy, and we’re going to have to make life harder on them. If you can’t rebound with these guys — I’m not saying we’re going to dominate them like we did Texas Tech on the boards, but you’ve got to at least rebound with them.
We can’t get drilled on the glass like we did against Arizona, Gonzaga, Florida, some of these teams with some real size. So if we don’t come with some toughness, some competitiveness, some physicality, we’re not going to be able to be in this game. The good thing is we’ve shown it enough times this year.
Q. For all three of you, what does it mean to be a massive underdog in this game? How do you embrace that?
LATRELL WRIGHTSELL JR.: I mean, we’re not really opposed to it. We know that Michigan is a really good team, and they’ve proven that multiple times throughout the season and stuff like that. We have the ultimate respect.
But we also know what we can do, too. And we know if we put in the work and we play our best and we play hard and we play for each other and have fun out there, we can compete with anybody in the country.
We know that they have a really good size and they have really good bigs and really good guard play, and they’re a full team. But we put in the work to be here, too. We lace our shoes the exact same way. We know we have the talent. We have the coaching staff. We have the game plan, and we have everything we need to be successful as well.
HOUSTON MALLETTE: Yeah, we’ve embraced adversity all year long. We’ve had 14 different starting lineups. We’ve had probably a million different lineups, who’s been available, who’s been out with injury.
We embrace it. Like Trel said, it’s a basketball game. We prepare. I think we’ve had our best two weeks of preparation. Like our practices last week were phenomenal and then our practice the past three days has been incredible. We love each other. We’ve got real Mudita. All respect to Michigan, they’ve got a really good program like Trel said. They’re really good all around. They’re well-coached. But we’re just excited for the opportunity.
LABARON PHILON: For me, just seeing the coaches get real riled up for this game. Coach Oats, all the coaches, they’re just ready to play. For a player just to see that, that just gives you more confidence that we’re going to be out there ready to play just like they are. They’re a great team, but we’ve also been finding our way here. I feel like we’ve progressed a lot. Just seeing that as a team that’s coming in really hot and playing against a great team is going to be a really good game.
