How Nate Oats and Eric Musselman Revived Alabama and Arkansas Basketball
One is a mid-40s former high school math teacher with an obsession for analytics and a stickler for shot selection. The other is a mid-50s ex-NBA head coach with a penchant for marketing and a knack for blending talent.
In many ways, Alabama coach Nate Oats and Arkansas coach Eric Musselman are very different. Their career paths couldn’t be anymore divergent, for instance, and their personalities are far from identical. Even their approach to the game varies.
But it’s not the differences that have them and their teams here, still dancing in the NCAA men's tournament’s second weekend. It’s their far-reaching commonalities.
“There’s a lot of Nate Oats in Eric Musselman and vice versa,” says Jimmy Dykes, a former coach and an ESPN basketball analyst specializing in the SEC. “They want to be going—all gas, no brakes.”
Oats and Musselman have done something few thought possible. Each of them, in just two years at their respective jobs, has revived a dormant basketball program at a football school in a football conference with a high-energy, up-tempo, blitzing style of hoops—think the spread in football!—that has not only stunned the league but is now cruising past teams in Indianapolis.
The two men are colorful and outspoken. They are bold and even sometimes brash. Their teams play like it, too—a furious brand of basketball that’s resulted in a 50-12 combined record and a rare Sweet 16 appearance.
Alabama hasn’t been here since 2004, and for Arkansas, it’s been even longer: 1996. They are two wins away from a trip to the Final Four. The No. 2 Crimson Tide (26-6) needs to beat No. 11 UCLA on Sunday night and then get past the Michigan-Florida State winner. No. 3 Arkansas (24-6) meets the tournament’s Cinderella, 15 seed Oral Roberts, on Saturday with the Baylor-Villanova winner waiting on the other side.
They carry the SEC banner with both style and panache. Of teams still dancing, Alabama and Arkansas are No. 2 and No. 3 in tempo, according to KenPom’s adjusted basketball statistics (No. 1 is the tournament’s top seed: Gonzaga). The Tide and the Razorbacks average 73.3 and 72.9 possessions per game, respectively, or about five more possessions than the average team. Their offenses are each in the top 40, and their defenses, often overshadowed, are each in the top 10.
Their coaches, meanwhile, are hotly competitive, passionate characters who, after a win, leap onto a scorer’s table (Musselman against Texas Tech); or shout toward the opposing bench to get the you-know-what out of the arena (Oats against LSU); or storm into the locker room shirtless (also Musselman).
They are fiery. They are fun. And they are, some might say, the bad boys of the Sweet 16.
Eric Musselman celebrates with his team on the court after defeating the Texas Tech Red Raiders in the second round of the NCAA men's basketball tournament on Mar 21, 2021.
Patrick Gorski/USA TODAY Sports
“They’re both very respectful of the game,” says ESPN analyst Jay Bilas, “but they want theirs now and they want it for their players. There are a lot of people that would say the game, years ago, included real characters, and we claim to love that. Yet, when we have characters now, we want more corporate. I like that. I like the way they do it.”
In separate interviews, the two coaches compliment one another. They both claim the other is creative, a master at the transfer market and, yes, operate similar approaches to the game. In short, they like to play fast and, for the most part, free.
“Our styles are really, really similar,” Musselman says. “They play with great pace and are much more reliant on the three-point shot than we are, but very similar in trying to play with pace.”
They rely on efficient, quick shooting, aggressive man defense and a fast-paced attack that prevents any slow-moving players from seeing the floor. Neither regularly uses a hulking big man. There’s no 7-foot center here or no 250-pound power forward.
What you will find are new faces. Counting true freshmen, transfers and players who sat out for injury or transfer last season, Arkansas plays an incredible 10 first-year players. Alabama has a half dozen.
Part of their turnaround effort was dabbling in a booming transfer market.
Oats brought in five transfers, two from the junior college ranks. Jordan Bruner, a 6-foot-10 Yale product and one of the Ivy League’s best players, is a capable shooter and rebounder. Jahvon Quinerly, from Villanova, comes off the bench for a change of pace (he makes nearly half of his shots and 44% of his threes), and freshman Josh Primo gives the Tide eight points an outing.
Of the 12 scholarship players at Arkansas, Musselman has four freshmen, three graduate transfers, three players who sat out last year after transferring and two players from the previous staff. Moses Moody, a freshman, is an NBA first-round talent who averages 17 points and 6 rebounds per game. The Hogs’ second-leading scorer, Justin Smith, a hybrid 6-foot-7 forward, transferred from Indiana, and Jaylen Tate is a former Horizon League player who runs the point for the Hogs.
Musselman and Oats took a path that will soon become the norm. The NCAA this spring is expected to pass a rule allowing players to transfer at least once without penalty. Coaches and analysts expect the college game to mirror NBA’s free agency.
Some are against it. Others embrace it.
“It’s going to be the way it is,” Bilas says. “Those who are complaining about the way it is trending are going to be left behind.”
Don’t count Musselman and Oats in that group. The two scour the college waiver wire more than most. But it’s tricky. Musselman, in fact, believes Arkansas was the beneficiary of poor decisions from other coaches who selected a transfer instead of plucking a high school player. The Hogs, he says, were able to sign four high school players because of it.
At Alabama, Oats inherited what he calls a roster of “six centers.” Many of them left. He infused the squad with transfers, along with keeping senior holdovers Herb Jones, the 6-foot-8 SEC player of the year and point man for the offense; and John Petty, an underrated defender who can swish the three.
“You can adjust your roster pretty quick if you know what you’re looking for,” says Oats. “I don’t think you can just go get the best players—you got to know what you want and how you want to play.”
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The two coaches have inadvertently drawn up a blueprint for quickly turning around a program. For those with NBA experience, it’s a simple adjustment. Musselman has spent most of his career in the pros, much of it in the developmental minor leagues.
“It’s no different than you’re sitting there coaching the LA Defenders and you pick up Gerald Green and he’s going to come on your roster and be your best player,” Musselman says. “You teach him a system, plug him in and he might get called up and you might get another guy. You never flinch and keep teaching and simplify things.”
Arkansas’ program is full of NBA faces and lingo. Musselman was a head coach in the NBA twice for a total of three seasons, at Golden State in 2002-04 and with the Kings in 2006-07. His Arkansas staff includes one of his former players with the Warriors (Earl Boykins); a longtime Lakers executive and scout (Clay Mossier); a title-winning guard for the Chicago Bulls (Corey Williams); and a former Rockets scout (David Patrick).
The Razorbacks recruiting meetings don’t often identify players as four and five stars, but instead refer to them as lottery picks, first-round picks, second-round picks and free agents, says Musselman. It’s their nature.
The son of a longtime college and pro coach, Musselman is a basketball lifer, raised on the sport by Bill Musselman, mostly known for stints as head coach of the Minnesota Golden Gophers in the 1970s and the Timberwolves in 1989-91.
At one point, Bill was one of the best marketers and promoters of any coach in college basketball. He thought his job wasn’t only to win games but fill an arena. He once signed a player with the Gophers because he could spin a ball so well on his finger, his son recalls, and he’d often hire out one-wheel cyclists to perform at halftime. His elaborate and synchronized warmups at Minnesota had the arena packed an hour before tip.
Son is like father. Musselman is known for unusual pregame motivation tactics. He once brought a toilet into the locker room so the team could flush the last game before moving on to the next one, Dykes says. Before another game, his assistants showed up in UPS uniforms to deliver packages to players with messages.
But social media is Musselman’s sweet spot. He’s got nearly 90,000 Twitter followers.
“He is probably the best we have in the college game at interacting on social media, engaging with his fans and recruitable student athletes,” Dykes says. “He had over 65,000 social media interactions in the month of February—No. 1 among all coaches.”
Oats’s path is different. While Musselman started his career in Golden State’s ticket office, Oats began at Romulus High School near Detroit as a math teacher and head basketball coach. He caught the eye of Buffalo head coach Bobby Hurley while Hurley recruited Detroit-area players, and Hurley eventually hired him on staff. When Hurley left, Danny White, then the Buffalo AD who is now at Tennessee, promoted Oats.
He’s known in college basketball circles as one of the game’s most advanced offensive innovators, a guy who relies heavily on analytics and statistics. He’s a self-proclaimed math nerd who believes in high percentage shots: around-the-rim buckets, getting to the free throw line and taking open threes.
His staff charts everything—every player’s shot percentage at pretty much every spot on the floor, even down to the arc of their three-pointers. More than anything, Oats is concerned with his team’s percentage of possessions with either a free throw, a layup/dunk or an open three.
“I think we’re close to 90% of our possessions ended in one of those three things. We may be No. 1 in the country at that,” he says. “I’m a big numbers guy. It’s all about efficiency. Our guys tell me ‘I can make that shot.’ And I tell them well I know you can make it but at what percentage do you make it?”
Nate Oats shouts at LSU coach Will Wade after Alabama defeated the Tigers in the SEC championship game on March 14. 2021.
Christopher Hanewinckel/USA TODAY Sports
Greg Byrne, Alabama’s athletic director, recalls interviewing Oats two years ago for the job. Within moments of meeting him, the coach launched into basketball Xs and Os, blowing away his interviewer.
“Watching him talk basketball to me… I love the game and I know the game decently and he was on a level that I hadn’t seen before,” Byrne says.
But for all the talk about offense, it’s the defense at the two places that made dramatic improvements from last year. With long, rangy and athletic hybrid players, both squads feature switchable guys. They play a ruthless man defense and can quickly get back up the floor to defend.
“When they're not shooting well, they’re defending well, which keeps the game workable,” says John Brady, a former longtime college head coach who now is a color analyst on LSU radio broadcasts. “There’s a lot of different ways to play basketball on the offensive end, but it’s like golf—guys drive the ball 300 yards, but they make their money 100 yards in. Defending and rebounding, regardless of how you want to play offense, is going to win one of those teams a championship.”
Brady knows a thing or two about manning a basketball program on the campus of a football power. He coached LSU for 11 years, leading the Tigers to the 2006 Final Four. For a portion of his tenure in Baton Rouge, Brady was LSU’s basketball coach while a familiar name walked the Tiger Stadium sideline: Nick Saban.
Saban and Oats bonded immediately. In fact, the Hall of Fame football coach invited him to sit in meetings and he traveled with the team to the Tide’s 2019 season opener against Duke in Atlanta. Oats says opposing coaches at first used Alabama’s reputation as a pigskin powerhouse to recruit against him.
You don’t want to go there—all they care about is football.
“At the time we’d say yeah we are a football school. We’re really good,” Oats says. “Guess what? Football makes a lot of money. We spend more money for a student athlete here just about anywhere in the country.
“Now that we’re winning, people would have to be idiots to say, ‘Don’t go to Alabama—it’s a football school.’ Why can’t we be both?”
Musselman embraces the football spirit in Fayetteville as well. He’s even sat in the student section for games.
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On Saturday, he’ll be walking the bench of a Sweet 16 game. A night later, so will his SEC colleague, both of them fiery, sometimes bold men who have revived SEC basketball programs with a transfer-laden, fasts-paced approach that may just be the new trend in the sport.
“I think they both have just enough brashness and cockiness and confidence about them that their team feeds off of that,” Dykes says. “Those teams play with those same descriptive words. They are right there, not afraid to go nose to nose with anybody.”
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