Similarities Between Hofstra and Texas Tech Helping Alabama Prepare for Red Raiders

TAMPA, Fla. — Short turnarounds are one of the NCAA Tournament's biggest challenges.

An Alabama basketball team that just spent five days preparing for Hofstra now has to regroup and refocus for a Round of 32 matchup with Texas Tech.

"Our guys have done a good job so far, getting off their feet, resting, being locked into video," head coach Nate Oats said. "Hopefully, we have a sharp practice here. It won't be a hard practice, but a walk-through, we'll get some stuff done in practice and just rest and shoot."

As Alabama prepared for the Pride last week, Oats put a staffer in charge of prepping for both Texas Tech and Akron, meaning that all of the film and analysis was ready to go immediately after Friday afternoon's win, helping with the short turnaround.

"There's not really enough time for us to go one-day prep for a game," walk-on and scout team member Jacob Martin said. "But we had our staff look beforehand, and we'll obviously go a lot more in-depth now."

The bulk of Alabama's practices this week were spent gameplanning for Hofstra's deliberate half-court offense. Alabama may be slightly ahead in its prep, as Texas Tech plays a similar style to Speedy Claxton's squad. Christian Anderson plays a similar role to Cruz Davis, as both are ball-dominant, screen-reliant point guards who facilitate most of the team's offense. Both play at a slow pace, with Texas Tech's 66.1 possessions per 40 minutes nearly identical to Hofstra's 64.8.

"I feel like we're prepared for many situations," guard Latrell Wrightsell said. "Hofstra played slow, and Texas Tech is a really good team, and they can mix it up. We're just pretty much prepared for everything. We try to do different scenarios in practice to emulate each different play style, even though we like to play really fast, we know that teams like to play slow, and there are teams in our conference that do that. So we're kind of used to pretty much a lot of play styles."

Alabama won't have the luxury of a reset, but neither will Texas Tech. The teams that make it to the second weekend are the ones that can implement a gameplan on the fly and adapt against their talented opponents.

"They had us prepared for whatever situation," center Aiden Sherrell said. "Our practices going up to this tournament had just been very competitive, and although we had that loss in the SEC Tournament, we had to look away from that and gather each other together and focus on making a long run in this tournament."

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