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Alabama basketball earned a No. 10 seed in this year’s SEC Tournament and will open up against No. 7 seed Ole Miss on Thursday at 4 p.m. CT inside Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena.
Alabama (17-14, 8-10 in the SEC) defeated Ole Miss (20-11, 10-8) 74-53 in Tuscaloosa, Ala., earlier this season. However, the Crimson Tide will need to beat an improved Rebels team Thursday if it wants to keep its NCAA Tournament hopes alive. Here are three questions, two thoughts and one prediction about the game.
Three questions
Who is going to step up?
Collin Sexton stepped up in the SEC Tournament for a reeling team and single handily willed them to the NCAA tournament with two victories in the SEC tournament. Kira Lewis? Tevin Mack? John Petty? Donta Hall? Who will it be? There is plenty of talent on this team for multiple guys to step up and carry the team, but right now Alabama just needs somebody to step up and become the leader.
What will Alabama's sense of urgency be?
There have been games in February where you wondered if Alabama wanted to even play a basketball game. Whether it was going down 10-0 to Florida in the first 5 minutes, getting run out of the gym in the first half against Auburn, and a slow start versus LSU. Those were all very big games for Alabama and they looked like they wanted to do anything else, but play basketball. In the first 5 minutes of games, you can typically tell how engaged Alabama is mentally. The crispness of passes, their cutting, rebounding, etc., you can easily tell where their mind is. If Alabama shows up engaged and mentally prepared, they can defeat any team in this tournament easily. The Ole Miss game was the best game Alabama has played this year when it came to bringing intensity the entire game. They will need a similar performance from earlier this year to down the Rebels once again.
