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A year ago, Mark Sears and the Alabama Crimson Tide men’s basketball team walked off the court in Phoenix, Arizona as 86-72 losers to eventual champion UConn in the Final Four.
The Tide played a sharp game that night — UConn was just better.
No one was better than Alabama on Thursday night in the 2025 Sweet 16. And no one was better from three in the entire history of the NCAA Tournament.
Alabama made a men’s tournament record 25 threes on an astounding 51 attempts in a resounding 113-88 win over BYU to reach the Elite Eight for the second straight year. Mark Sears, the Tide’s senior leader, went 10-15.
“Once you’re in the game, you kind of zone out,” he said after the game. “We felt a lot of shots falling and that’s contagious.”
Aden Holloway hit six threes of his own and Chris Youngblood added five more to shoot Alabama back to the brink of the Final Four.
“The [2024] Final Four, it still kind of does feel fresh because it’s like just last week that we were there,” Sears said. “Being able to want to feel that again is definitely a big motivating factor.”
Last year, Alabama entered the tournament as an 11-loss 4 seed. The Crimson Tide slipped past North Carolina in the Sweet 16 and reached the Final Four by outlasting upstart Clemson in the Elite Eight.
This year Alabama was expected to get where it is now, both in the eyes of the Selection Committee that gave it a 2 seed and by each other.
And their lofty expectations didn’t waver over the past month as Sears was mired in a horrific shooting slump. Before his heater against the Cougars, he was five for his last 35 from three, dating back to March 5.
“My confidence is still the same,” he said. “I never stopped believing in myself and my teammates never stopped giving me confidence.”
He added that it comes down to trusting the work that he’s put in all year. Alabama coach Nate Oats elaborated on what that work was.
“These guys show up for voluntary shooting every time it's available to make sure that they're ready to go, and that work pays off,” he said, referring to Sears, Holloway and Youngblood. “We want to base our program on hard work.”
Why BYU was the perfect opponent for Alabama basketball
As Oats put it, Alabama’s brand of basketball was designed to beat a defense like BYU’s.
“BYU with their personnel, we knew that once they started going under [screens] — they always collapse. They kind of have to,” he said. “They got away with it against some teams that don't space like we do.”
Based on the tape that Oats and his staff watched in the days leading up to the game, he knew that if BYU continued to go under ball screens, his team would make them pay.
“They had been going under ball screens on just about every game we watched,” Oats said. “I told both Holloway and Sears, I hope they go under us because we're gonna rain 'em.”
That’s exactly how the Cougars started out, and Alabama knocked down 12 threes in the first half. That’d be an incredible number if the Crimson Tide didn’t come right back out of the locker room and top it — even after BYU adjusted. The Cougars began hedging on screens and tightened their defense on Sears.
All that did was temporarily give Holloway the keys before Sears got going again — and his teammates knew he would.
“I had no idea he was shooting 14%,” Youngblood said of Sears’ recent slump. “Mark is an incredible player. All I know is when he gets the ball, the defense is collapsing on him.”
Alabama now has a quick turnaround before perhaps the toughest test it will face all year. The Crimson Tide will play Duke in the Elite Eight on Saturday night in front of what is sure to be a partisan Blue Devil crowd in Newark.
