KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Alabama coach Nate Oats spoke to reporters after the Crimson Tide’s heartbreaking 79-76 to No. 5 Tennessee on Saturday. The Crimson Tide had a chance for a statement victory on the road, but coaching errors led to a 7-0 finish to the Volunteers snatching a win with a buzzer-beater 3.

Here’s everything Nate Oats said after the loss.

“That’s a tough way to lose. You’ve gotta give Tennessee a lot of credit for not quitting. We had them down nine mid-way through the second half. These guys compete hard.

“We didn’t do a great job closing it. I take most of the blame for the last 30 seconds. I subbed out bigs out to get the rebound before I should’ve. I shouldn’t have subbed them out until after we secured the rebound. So that was on me, and then I had the chance to call a timeout. Coaches can call timeouts so we can get another out-of-bounds play, and at four, I should have called it. I thought we were gonna get it in. It’s on me.

“And then we probably could have had better guys — we went a little smaller at the end with the 3.8 on the clock to make sure they could get the ball up the floor. So we work on end-of-game situations in practice. We expect our players to be good at it and I was not good for the last 30 seconds today. I feel like I failed these guys. For 39-and-a-half minutes, they outplayed them. They were up four.

“Tough call on Grant’s verticality at the end. But that’s the game of basketball. Lot of tough calls in the game. Worst-case scenario is, if they make the free throw, we still have the ball with 30 seconds to go up one, and I should have left the guys in to make sure that we secured it before we got to the offensive end. We foul, give up the rebound at the free-throw line. They make 2-for-2, which you’ve gotta give them credit. We’ve gotta do a better job making the free throws. They shoot 73%. We shoot 65%. We shot 50% at the rim, 60% at the line — it’s hard to win big games like this, but we were still up four with 30 seconds to go and too many coaching mistakes in the final 30 seconds.

“I mean, you gotta convert your at-the-rims and you gotta convert your free throws. You can’t beat a good team — typically, we’re shooting — what were we on layups? 12-for-29. That’s not good enough against a team like this. You gotta get the ball in the paint, and it was everybody. I mean, kinda going through. We had our guys 16 of 32 at the rim. So there’s a few in there — I mean, nobody was great at the rim, to be honest with you. Youngblood was 1-for-1 nobody else was over 60% at the rim. Labaron and Dioubate were 60%, everybody else was 50% or lower. So it’s not just one guy it’s across the board. We gotta convert at the rim

“And then at the free-throw line, Sears goes 6-for-6 and that’s it. Nobody else made all their free throws. So the free throws, the at-the-rims, it’s a team effort. We gotta be better with them on everybody.”

“We played the No. 1 defense in the country. We’re up four with 30 seconds to go. This will make us pay a little more attention to our end-of-game. Our end-of-half situation wasn’t great either. We should have taken the last shot, gave them too much time, came down, gave them the and-1. So, they’re plus-1 in that scenario. If we would have waited to go a little later, we go plus- 2 in that scenario.

“Moving forward, we gotta really lock in on the end-of-half, end-of-game, special situations. I gotta be much better for this team on that. I think we just pump up how we played during the course of the game and some controllables like the end-of-game situation stuff that we didn’t do a very good job with.”

“We probably need to get our out-of-bounds package earlier in the week instead of giving it to them the day before so then focus on some other stuff. And they’re good. They’re physical. They make it hard to get it in. That’s terrible to have the amount of turnovers we do on the underneath-out-of-bounds. We had the one over there to try to get it to Mo D. So, some of that is on me too, to be honest with you. I gotta do a better job for these guys.”

“For sure I did. I told the guys halfway through that timeout, ‘we’re not putting them away. He’s on the bench. He’s the only guy that really creates a lot of offense for them.’ You gotta give Gainey a lot of credit tonight. Gainey stepped up in Zeigler’s absence if you will. He plays 30 minutes. He didn’t even make a 3, he ends up with 16 points, 6 of 13. He just kinda got to the midrange shot a little too much. He got to the line. He was 6 of 6 at the line. So give Gainey a bunch of credit, but yeah, I didn’t think we got up on them like we could have with Zeigler out of the game in that part or stretch of the first half.”

“I didn’t, to be honest with you. I thought it was still too slow. I’m looking, we had 72 possessions. I’m sure they would have liked it under 70. They have the slowest tempo in our league because it’s hard to score on them. We even scored a few late in the shot clock that we were fortunate to score. So, we got way too late in the shot clock too much. We didn’t get enough out in transition, especially in the second half. I thought when we got up nine I thought the game slowed down a lot after we got up nine. And part of that’s when you’re not getting stops and they’re at the free throw line and the balls not going through the net its hard to get out. So it might have been a little more at times what we wanted but I don’t even know for the whole game, to be honest with you.”