Alabama Basketball Highlights The Sport's Desperate Need For Development: Just A Minute

Welcome to BamaCentral’s "Just a Minute," a video series featuring BamaCentral's Alabama beat writers. Multiple times per week, the writers will group up or film solo to provide their take on a topic concerning the Crimson Tide or the landscape of college sports.

Watch the above video as BamaCentral's Theodore Fernandez breaks down the careers of Aden Holloway and Sam Walters, and what they tell us about the state of development in college basketball.

Alabama basketball stands as one of the strongest examples of the value of development in today's world of college sports. Aden Holloway is a prime example of a player whose career greatly benefited from development within a program. He resembled an AAU player as a freshman in 2024 and has turned himself into a well-rounded offensive superstar, one of the team's best playmakers who can impact a game in countless different ways. This has come thanks to a buy-in to Nate Oats' system and the development that came from it.

On the flip side, former Alabama forward Sam Walters has seen his career bottom out after transferring away from the program. Walters had an up-and-down season as a freshman on Alabama's Final Four roster. He had some big offensive stretches and showed very high upside on that end of the floor, but was a complete liability defensively. Walters transferred to Michigan and then SMU, where he now averages less than three points per game as a junior, while showing zero defensive growth.

Where would Walters be if he had not left Alabama? I would argue that he is almost certainly a high-usage starter with a greatly improved defensive skillset. The spacing he provides with his three-point shooting is a luxury for any team, and with time to bulk up and learn how to play defense in Oats' system, he could have been a much more balanced player by this point in his career.

It’s easy to forget that Sam Walters was viewed as a future draft prospect as a freshman with flashes he’d shown.

If he’d just accepted a smaller role last year and developed in the system, he’d likely be starting for Bama right now and getting ready to go pro after the season https://t.co/Qz6xMSN1KJ
— Theodore Fernandez (@TheoFernandez__) February 16, 2026

Basketball as a sport already had the problem of star athletes avoiding true development, going all the way down to the AAU level. The transfer portal has allowed that trend to continue, with athletes able to jump ship any time there is any kind of roadblock, even when that roadblock will only help them long term.

A big part of the reason that Walters transferred was due to the likelihood of once again being a role player on the 2024-25 Crimson Tide team. It makes sense; in fact, it is objectively the logical move to leave to go somewhere that will provide a better opportunity to play— at least that is the logic that athletes operate under. How many athletes have left programs where they would have developed into key pieces, only to find that the grass was not greener?