So Alabama is a football school? Not during March Madness on Nate Oats' watch | Goodbread
Check your calendar before you soak this in:
Alabama is ranked No. 1, and it's … March?
Yes, the Crimson Tide, home of a middling SEC basketball team for eight of the last 10 years, home of a football program that casts the longest shadow in college sports, really is the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament.
Football-school status doesn't change, but for now, put it on hold.
GOODBREAD: Alabama basketball's SEC Tournament title meant more to Noah Gurley. Here's why
PRINTABLE BRACKET: March Madness - Print and fill out your 2023 NCAA Tournament bracket
Alabama was placed in the South Region by the selection committee, and will face the winner of a play-in game between Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and Southeast Missouri State with the benefit of a nearby venue in Birmingham on Thursday. A victory there would pit the Crimson Tide against the Maryland-West Virginia winner on Saturday. And if Alabama plays anything like it did in Sunday's blowout of Texas A&M in the SEC Tournament championship game, it could leave Birmingham with 31 wins − 31! − before heading to Louisville for regional semifinal action.
Checking my calendar again. Yep, still March.
Pollen is flying. Bees are buzzing and daylight savings just sprung us forward, not back. Helmets and shoulder pads are still in the field house. Football season is nearly six months away. And the eye of the March Madness storm is somehow in Tuscaloosa, where streets are named after coaches in that other sport that's played in the fall. That forthcoming, hotly-contested quarterback competition? It'll keep for now.
Spring football practice, if you hadn't heard, gets underway March 20.
And if UA coach Nate Oats has anything to say about it, Alabama basketball just might keep playing long enough to steal some spotlight normally reserved for the gridiron.
That wasn't the case just one year ago. March of '22 wasn't at all kind as Alabama basketball sputtered through the end of the regular season, sputtered again in an SEC Tournament loss to Vanderbilt and limped into the NCAA Tournament with neither steadiness nor swag. The result was predictable: a first-round ouster. By the time Nick Saban was blowing a whistle on the practice field, Oats was pretty much collecting jerseys for storage.
This team is different.
It's hot, coming off of three consecutive SEC Tournament wins with a level of momentum that Crimson Tide basketball has rarely matched this late in the season.
It's opening act in the Big Dance will be just an hour from its campus.
And it has every ingredient a basketball team needs to navigate survive-and-advance season: depth, defense, resolve, outstanding guard play, a 7-foot shot-blocking monster in Charles Bediako, and an NBA-ready, go-to scorer in freshman Brandon Miller. It has been, from the moment Charles Barkley famously declared it to the moment the NCAA Tournament selection committee awarded it the No. 1 overall seed, the best team in the country.
Until further notice, it's still basketball season in Tuscaloosa.
And your calendar doesn't lie.
Reach Chase Goodbread at cgoodbread@gannett.com. Follow on Twitter @chasegoodbread.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: March Madness at Alabama under Nate Oats means football-school status on hold
