Three Takeaways From Alabama Basketball's Annihilation Over Texas

The No. 2 Crimson Tide cruised past Texas with a 103-80 road victory on Tuesday evening.

Feb 11, 2025; Austin, Texas, USA; Alabama Crimson Tide guard Mark Sears (1) lays in a basket while defended by Texas Longhorns guard Tramon Mark (12) during the second half at Moody Center. Mandatory Credit: Scott Wachter-Imagn Images / Scott Wachter-Imagn Images

No. 2 Alabama men's basketball blew out Texas 103-80 on the road on Tuesday evening. This win was the Crimson Tide's 10th of SEC play this season.

The Crimson Tide displayed dominance and superiority on both sides of the floor, but one stat category continues to be worrisome, as it has been all season.

There's so much to dissect from this matchup at Moody Center. Here are three takeaways:

The Fab Five

Since his arrival in 2019, head coach Nate Oats has built Alabama's offense around a fast-paced system that heavily involves shots taken from behind the arc. Year after year, the Crimson Tide is among the top scoring offenses in the nation and this year is no different as 90.2 points per game is the most in the country.

Alabama had its best three-point shooting night of the season with 17 makes from seven different players. The Crimson Tide finished the game 17-for-29 from deep, which calculates to an incredible 59 percent.

Not only did Alabama forward Jarin Stevenson finish with a season-high, but the sophomore scored a career-high 22 points on 7-for-8 from the field, including 4-for-5 from long range. Alabama head coach Nate Oats and numerous players said before the season that Stevenson was the most-improved player from last year's team and Wednesday night was a glimpse of what we've been waiting for.

“It was definitely just my teammates hitting me good,” Stevenson said during the postgame press conference. “We call it 42 passes, hitting me in a good shot pocket. I feel like that really helped them just hit me when I was open. I’ve been working and preparing, working on my footwork and stuff like that. So I feel like that really helped me have a night like this.”

Preseason All-American guard Mark Sears and sixth-man Aden Holloway each finished with 18 points on a combined five threes. Forward Mouhamed Dioubate also shined from deep as he hit all three of his attempts to help reach 13 points on the night.

Alabama freshman guard Labaron Philon came into Tuesday night with one game over 10 points in the last five contests. While an ankle injury was a big reason for this, he still didn't meet Oats' standard. However, the three-time SEC Freshman of the Week returned to form against Texas, as he finished the game with 15 points on 6-for-10 from the field, including 3-for-5 from behind the arc, six rebounds, a team-high four assists and a steal in 25 minutes on the floor.

In total, five players scored at least 13 points for the Crimson Tide. That is a tremendous accomplishment and truly shows the amount of depth Alabama has, especially since three of those players came off the bench.

“I wish we could shoot it like this all the time," Oats said. "I mean, we shot almost 60 percent from three, shot 62 percent from the field. We spend a lot of time in the gym but sometimes you get some open looks, you knock them down, it helps the game go the way you want."

Turnovers are Still a Major Issue

"There's got to be some in-the-moment consequence for dumb turnovers, which we just don't tolerate. "When we do have a longer time to practice because we didn't practice the day before...[maybe we have to] mix a little bit more of that stuff in."

Oats said the quote above before the LSU game and turnovers are still very much a problem for his team.

When Alabama wins, these takeaways articles have two positive outlooks and one negative outlook. A heavy majority of the Crimson Tide's now 21 victories have a takeaway that revolves around turnovers and this article is no different.

Alabama has been known for its extremely fast-paced offense all season. But sometimes going too quickly results in making mistakes, even for the No. 2 team in the country. The Crimson Tide's 13.26 turnovers per game this season is the second-most in the SEC and Alabama's -2.78 turnover margin is the worst in the conference.

Oats' team has committed at least 10 turnovers in all but five games this season and Tuesday night added to the list as Alabama gave the ball away 17 times compared to Texas' nine. The Longhorns certainly took advantage of the Tide's mistakes as it scored a whopping 26 points off turnovers.

“We had way too many turnovers again," Oats said. "That’s becoming a major issue with us. You’ve got to give Texas a lot of credit. They got into us. They were physical with us. They forced some turnovers....The turnovers, that was a little upsetting."

Eight of Alabama's turnovers came within the first 13 minutes, which helped Texas as it was down by just five points at the time. The giveaways were essentially keeping the Longhorns and the home crowd in the game early, up until the aforementioned elite shooting.

Alabama Defense Shows Positive Signs

The Crimson Tide may have allowed 10 points off turnovers in the first half, but giving the ball away nine times could've resulted in an even worse scoring total in that category. In other words, Alabama showed some positive signs in its transition defense with its speed.

But when Alabama didn't turn the ball over in the first half, it locked the Longhorns down as Texas closed the opening period shooting 10-for-35 from the field (28.6 percent), including 3-for-12 (25 percent) from behind the arc. Alabama guard Chris Youngblood, Sears and Dioubate each swiped a steal and center Clifford Omoruyi snatched two blocks heading into the break.

In the first half, Texas scored on 14 of its 35 possessions (40 percent) while the Crimson Tide went 21-for-35 (60 percent). The Longhorns showed a ton of improvement in the second half offensively as it scored on 59.5 percent of its possessions, but Alabama had already taken its foot off the defensive pedal due to prolific work from the offense throughout.

Nevertheless, the performance of Longhorns freshman guard and SEC leading scorer Tre Johnson can not be ignored. Philon was a teammate of the Texas superstar last year at Link Academy, a school in Missouri that's known for its basketball prowess. The two of them led Link Academy to the No. 3 spot in the final national rankings.

Philon gave the Crimson Tide some insight about Johnson's skillset prior to the game, but it simply did not work as Johnson finished with 24 points on 9-for-17 from the field, including 4-for-8 from downtown. He was consistent in both halves as he scored 14 in the first and 10 in the second––meaning Alabama never really had an answer for him, even though Oats was relatively pleased with Stevenson's defense on Johnson.

"We knew he was going get his shots up, we just need to make sure they were tough and contested," Oats said. "He’s gonna make some. He’s not gonna make enough tough non-rim twos to beat us. So, don’t let him get to the rim. Let’s run him off the three-point line. We didn’t do a very good job of that at times. We gave up the three in the corner on the underneath out-of-bounds play. We gave up the three in transition where we didn’t get matched to him. There were a couple of threes he got that we didn’t do a great job.

“We tried to make sure that they took as many non-rim twos [as possible]...Our thing was, we knew they’d settle a little bit for [non-rim twos]. So with Tre, we had some traps and some blitzes. The problem was when we kind of came with the baseline trap and missed, we were giving up offensive rebounds. So we decided that we'd be better off just settling with him taking a tough contested pull-up over one of our defenders and not giving up the O-boards because they almost doubled us in second-chance points which isn’t good."

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