Sports
Alabama basketball 100-point games: How Nate Oats' team passed Kentucky's 1995-96 mark – Tuscaloosa Magazine
Editor’s note: This story has been updated from a previous version.
For all their inherent charm, passion and intensity, college basketball games often aren’t the highest-scoring affairs.
While the NBA has 48-minute games, a 24-second shot clock and the best players in the world, NCAA men’s basketball has 40-minute games, a 30-second shot clock and only a small percentage of its players every year who will ever reach the highest level of professional basketball.
Because of that, it’s rare for a common feature of NBA games — one team scoring at least 100 points — to occur in the college ranks.
Unless Alabama is involved, of course.
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The Crimson Tide has been a juggernaut offensively this season, even after losing 2023 SEC Player of the Year and No. 2 overall NBA Draft pick Brandon Miller from the previous year’s team.
Few statistics sum up coach Nate Oats’ team quite like its astonishing ability to hit the 100-point benchmark.
As it advanced to the second round of the 2024 NCAA Tournament Friday night with a victory against Charleston, the Tide made a bit of history, too, scoring at least 100 points in a game for the 10th time this season and breaking a tie with Kentucky’s 1995-96 team for most 100-point games by an SEC team in a season over the past 30 years.
Alabama had tied the Wildcats in its 103-88 victory vs. Ole Miss on Feb. 28. Per Friday’s truTV telecast, the Crimson Tide is now tied for the most 100-point games by an SEC team in a single season since the 1989-90 LSU basketball team, which like Alabama scored 10 100-point games.
Just how potent has Alabama been this season? Here’s a look at the numbers:
Entering Friday’s NCAA Tournament games, the Tide led all Division I teams in scoring, averaging 90.8 points per game.
Even in games it didn’t reach the 100-point mark, Alabama has gotten dangerously close on several other occasions. It has twice finished a game with 99 points, doing so in wins against Oregon and Mississippi State. It also tallied 98 points in a victory against Mercer on Nov. 17. In 15 contests this season, which makes up nearly half of the team’s 33 regular-season games to date, it has finished with at least 90 points.
Those figures are made possible in some part by Oats’ offense, a fast-paced scheme that currently ranks Alabama 11th among 362 Division I teams in tempo. That system is built around higher-value shots — either closer to the rim, which offers higher-percentage scoring opportunities, or from 3s, which are (obviously) worth more points.
It’s not just that the Tide has been productive. It has been efficient, too.
Alabama ranks among the top 40 Division I teams in both field goal percentage (47.7%) and 3-point percentage (36.5%), and reached the latter figure despite ranking fourth in Division I in attempts from 3 per game.
Additionally, the Tide is third in adjusted offensive efficiency, according to metrics from KenPom.com. It finished in the top 30 teams in that category in three of Oats’ first four seasons, but never higher than No. 16.
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Here’s a list of Alabama’s 100-point games this season, all of which came in wins:
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The team Alabama was tied for most 100-point games over the last 30 years isn’t just any other squad.
Kentucky’s 1995-96 team is widely regarded as one of the best in men’s college basketball history. That season, under coach Rick Pitino, the Wildcats went 34-2 overall and 16-0 in SEC regular-season play before going on to win the program’s first national championship since 1978. On their NCAA Tournament run, they won games by an average of 21.5 points per game.
A team that featured six future NBA first-round draft picks — Tony Delk, Antoine Walker, Walter McCarty, Derek Anderson, Ron Mercer and Nazr Mohammed — scored at least 100 points nine times that season, including twice in the NCAA Tournament. The Wildcats had at least 120 points in three of those games.
