Alabama head coach Nate Oats reveals why he benched Mark Sears in 2nd half vs. LSU
Yesterday at 11:15 AM
If you took a quick scan of the box score after Alabama’s 80-73 win over the LSU Tigers on Saturday night, the first thing you’d likely notice is that high-scoring All-American guard Mark Sears was held scoreless in just 17 minutes of action. The natural assumption would be that the Tide’s leading scorer was either hampered by foul trouble or left the game early because of injury, but neither of those proved to be true. Sears didn’t pick up a single foul in his 17 minutes of action, and as far as we know, he has a clean bill of health.
It turns out the decision to keep Sears on the bench for the entirety of the 2nd half was one made solely by Alabama head coach Nate Oats, who made it clear that the objective in the 2nd half was to turn things around and course-correct after his Tide and the Tigers were tied at 40 points apiece as the first 20 minutes of action came to a conclusion.
“We played the guys that we thought gave us the best chance to win in the second half,” Nate Oats said after the game, according to ESPN News Services. “I didn’t think our second-half defense has been very good lately, so we made the point to the guys, we’re done starting the same group that starts the game. Our defense was significantly better in the second half than in the first half, and we haven’t done that much this year.”
Alabama boasts the highest scoring offense in the country, having scored at least 100 points six times this season while putting up just over 90 points per game. Conversely, the Tide are ranked 332nd out of 364 teams in scoring defense. That’s not all on Sears, though it’s fair to say that the 6-foot-1 point guard is arguably the weakest link for the Tide defensively. The bigger problem on Saturday seemed to be that Sears missed all five of his field goal attempts and dished out just three assists while committing a pair of turnovers.
It was only five days earlier when Sears became just the 82nd player in NCAA Division 1 history to score at least 2,500 points in their collegiate career. After that feat, Oats stated that offensively, Sears is the most consistent player he’s ever coached.
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