Anthony Robinson II stepped to the free-throw line midway through the first half with a chance to give Missouri separation against No. 23 Alabama on Tuesday night.
For nearly eight minutes, the Tigers had ground out offense from empty-side pick-and-rolls and secondary high ball screens, nudging ahead 16–13. Robinson was fouled rising for a pull-up three — the kind of moment that can steady a road underdog. Instead, the junior only sank one, and Alabama immediately answered with back-to-back triples.
Five minutes later, the Tide were in complete control, ripping off a 13–2 run on the way to a 90–64 victory.
Outlandish as it sounds, Alabama didn’t overwhelm Missouri. This wasn’t a powder keg of shot-making. The Tide pulled ahead through boring means, by exploiting MU’s struggles with drop coverage, screen navigation, controlled close-outs, and sprinting back in transition. And MU simply couldn’t flip momentum.
For MU, it was another reminder of what happens when it can’t convert quality looks, gets a little too loose with the ball, and fails to capitalize at the charity stripe. Once the Tide’s lead reached double digits, the best MU could do was trim it to nine points early in the second half – until another 15-2 surge over 4:30 made it a 24-point lead just before the under-eight timeout.
Why does that distinction matter?
Oats’ teams have a reputation for swamping opponents in a microburst of triples over a couple of minutes. That didn’t unfold on Tuesday. Its runs, which totaled 28-4, took almost 8 minutes of game time. There were sometimes two- or three-possession interludes between makes where MU could have halted the Tide. Heck, Gates used two 30-second timeouts in service of that goal during the second half.
Yet, as Sam Snelling pointed out in Study Hall, the Tigers’ woeful shooting from long distance and at the free-throw line made it impossible.
But again, you can’t draw a line directly to the Tide’s defensive efforts. Oats’ staff focused its efforts on subtle forms of disruption. For example, it would top lock guards trying to cut over staggered screens. They would jam away screens at the top of the key, throwing off the timing of handoffs and step-up pick-and-rolls. And they would just sag off when MU tried to run pick-and-rolls featuring Mark Mitchell on an empty side of the floor.
Still, the Tigers outshot the Tide inside the arc and outscored them by six points at the rim. MU’s undoing was poor decision-making on drives by the likes of T.O. Barrett, who committed two turnovers while trying to complete drop-offs in the lane and mishandling the ball in early-clock situations.
Unsurprisingly, the worst-performing lineups were the ones on the floor when the Tide punished MU’s sloppiness.
Coming into Tuesday, there was a tension between how MU would try to contain a pair of dynamic pick-and-roll creators without getting so leveraged that it led to a barrage of open threes. In the lookahead, I wondered how a big man like Shawn Phillips Jr. might fare in drop coverage. Well, it turns out that Mitchell was the front-court player who let rollers get behind him or left windows open for pocket passes.
On the perimeter, Stone struggled at times to fight over flare screens. And there were a couple of instances where Wrightsell benefited from teammates setting timely screens to free him up on the weakside, a testament to the microdetails that Oats has drilled into his squad. However, there were at least three makes where the Tigers simply lost track of Wrightsell early in a possession as Alabama flowed out of a secondary break.
When I look at position performance, I can also see a reason why each Tiger should be in the red. Stone for his struggles in the shell, Mitchell for the slip-ups in ball-screen defense, Crews for some questionable close-outs, and Barrett for ill-timed giveaways. The irony is that Phillips delivered a relatively clean performance on a night where the rest of the rotation stumbled.
And I didn’t find myself disgusted while watching this one back. We’re at a juncture where games don’t expose new and glaring flaws. We’re simply trying to see whether they amplify familiar ones.
The Tigers’ margin for error is known. You can account for it in the build-up to tip-off, too. All Bama did was dispense brutal reinforcement of what happens when execution slips against the wrong opponent. Cluster enough minor breakdowns in a short enough span, and this team confronts a deficit that it doesn’t have the capacity to erase.
The problem is that the calendar no longer cushions those mistakes.
Analytical models don’t forecast a clear-cut win once the Tigers make the turn into the home stretch of the SEC schedule. They need at least six more wins to feel remotely confident about their hopes for an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament. The penalty for suboptimal lineups and preventable mistakes is far more punitive now.
The room for error is shrinking, and the schedule isn’t going to offer many opportunities to get it back.