TUSCALOOSA, ALA. — Alabama coach Nate Oats spoke to the ESPN College GameDay crew on Saturday. The traveling show is in Tuscaloosa for No. 2 Alabama’s massive rivalry clash against No. 1 Auburn.

Here’s everything Oats said on College GameDay.

“Stop turning the ball over. We got too many turnovers. We gotta stop turning the ball over. We gotta rebound it a little bit better. And then if our defense can get a little bit better. It’s been great at times. It hasn’t been great for a full 40 minutes yet. So if we can get some defensive consistency over 40 minutes and stop turning the ball over and then rebound it a little bit better we’ve got a chance to win it all.”

“That’s a good one. Where is Lexi by the way? She’s been here since before I was here. She always has a comment on my sport coats whether she likes them or she don’t. And sometimes when she’s not at the game live, I kind of go ‘We’ll, it didn’t look like that in person.’

“Best advice they give me? Shoot, sometimes they just keep you humble. I mean the other game when we won. I forget which game was happening, maybe Arkansas? They’re like, ‘Dad why were we so terrible? Why did we only win by four?’ I get a lot of coaching advice from the girls. ‘Why’d you keep such and such in the game? He was terrible tonight.’ I won’t mention any names.”

“Yeah, Latrell Wrightsell would be a perfect example. His effective field goal percentage wasn’t ridiculously high, but his catch-and-shoot rate was really high. His uncontested catch-and-shoots were high and he took so many — I think half his shots at Fullerton were mid-range 2s and that’s gonna drop your percentage really low. So if you just look at field goal percentage or even effective field goal percentage, he wasn’t great. He was solid. But if you look at the shots — we’re gonna get him in our offense. He’s gonna look a lot better and low and behold he comes here and he’s a 44% 3-point shooter and one of the best shooters in the country for us last year and until he got hurt this year.

“So you’ve gotta kind of look at what they would do in your system. We’ve got an analytics company that helps us do a lot of that stuff. You can’t look at just what they’re doing in the system they’re in, you’ve got to look at what they’d look like in your system and that’s how we use it in the transfer portal.”

“I told our staff and we had the bye week and we tried to take the beginning of that bye week to get some of these really good teams in the second half, not just the next game. And I’m watching one of Auburn’s games and they stole two buckets in the first eight minutes of the game on underneath out-of-bounds, exploiting what the other team did on an underneath out. So we’ve gotta try to we’re doing that.

“So you look at how they guard, and there’s good things and bad things with how teams guard. They can try to turn you over but then they give something up. Like we’ve gotta figure out what they give up and try to exploit them on that. Sometimes its matchups because of the way that they cross-match scheme-wise too. Sometimes it’s a little bit of both. Sometimes it backfires and you get a pick-6 going the other way and then they’re not very happy over there.”

“It’s Ryan [Pannone] or Adam [Bauman’s] fault when its a pick-6 and when it’s good, that was my play, right?

Obviously, we’ve got some educated fans because they understand that playing hard and making blue-collar plays wins basketball games. But even when you get to analytics. Like, Houston Mallette who ended up redshirting has the highest offensive leverage on the team. But the guys that are currently playing, the highest one on the team is Dioubate. Even though he’s not necessarily a great shooter, he’s got the highest offensive leverage on the team. And then certain games when he’s locked into the scouting report better than others he’s got very high defensive leverage too. But analytically, we’re really good when he’s in because he gets offensive rebounds. He gets shooters open. You can create advantages for him.

“So, you don’t have to be an elite shooter — now we can’t play four guys that aren’t great shooters out there together — but shoot, Herb Jones is in the building. I saw when I pulled in. Herb Jones — he didn’t shoot very many 3s when I was here and we were really good when he was in the game. Now we had good shooters all around him to help though.”

“Yeah, especially the guys that the expected value on their open shots is high. Like Mark Sears, he can’t turn down open shots because then it ends up being a turnover later in the possession. Him, Holloway, Philon, Youngblood. Like those guys have to take open catch-and-shoot 3s. And even Dioubate’s been in the gym working. He went 3-for-3 in the last game. So, they want to leave guys open. They did it with Clowney when he was here and all of a sudden he starts knocking them down. Jarin Stevenson’s at almost 40% since the end of November. So we’ve got guys that can make shots.”

“Yeah, which one of those games are a gimme? There’s no easy ones there. It’s got a number in front of every one of them. Yeah, I mean obviously this is a big game, we know that. That’s why all these people are here so early in the morning and why you’re here. But if you win this on and then drop another one, a loss is a loss in the SEC, and we’re trying to win the regular season. So, we’re gonna be ready to go tonight, we know that. But then we’ve gotta turn this thing around and be ready to go at Missouri. Be ready to go turn around against Kentucky.

It’s a gauntlet, but you’ve gotta come ready to go. I think that’s why our non-conference schedules help so much because we had a lot of good games in there. We had quite a stretch there as well. Not quite like this, but pretty close. So, I think our guys are ready for it.”