Nate Oats recaps Alabama’s loss to Tennessee basketball

Tennessee (13-6, 3-3 SEC) won its third contest in SEC basketball play at No. 17 Alabama (13-6, 3-3 SEC) during the 2025-26 season. The Vols were victorious, 79-73, at Coleman Coliseum in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Saturday’s win marked Tennessee’s fifth consecutive against the Crimson Tide.

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The Vols were led by Nate Ament (29 points) and Ja’Kobi Gillespie (24 points). Felix Okpara was Tennessee’s leader in rebounds (eight), while Gillespie also led the Vols with four assists.

Alabama head coach Nate Oats discussed the SEC matchup after the game.

“Obviously not the outcome we were looking for, got to give Tennessee a ton of credit,” Oats said. “They had a week off just like we did and they came ready to go. Defensively, we weren’t as good as I thought we needed to be in the first half, and we’ve had a major issue with second-half starts. A three-point lead (at halftime), I felt, should’ve been a lot bigger. We took care of a few things on the defensive end in the first half and then all of a sudden it disappeared immediately in the second half. They went from down three to up six pretty quickly. We need to find out how to have a lot better starts in the second half and we need to figure out how to make tougher plays. Tennessee is typically one of the toughest teams as far as physicality, effort, and rebounding, they are one of the tougher teams in the league.

“Too many guys get their season highs on us. Nate Ament comes out and scores his season high on us. We obviously know he is a talented player, he is supposed to go in the lottery and we did not really have anybody step up and do a good job stopping him. Tennessee is a really good defensive team and we did not do a good job attacking them, in large parts to us not being able to get enough stops and get out in transition. We did not nearly have any transition buckets which is not how we are supposed to play. We have now lost back-to-back home games. We had a great crowd, I thought they were unbelievable. Thank them…

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Publish date : 2026-01-25 14:30:00

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