Vanderbilt moves to 15-0 on the season on Wednesday night, defeating Alabama 96-90. Vanderbilt against Alabama was one of the premier games of the week. Nate Oats knew that going in, based on his pregame comments. After the game. Vanderbilt star Tyler Tanner remembered those comments.
“We’ve got a lot of guys who want to win. We’re putting the team before ourselves every time. We heard what Nate Oats was saying before, that we didn’t have a lot of good games before this – we had some high-majors, but no real good teams. We kind of took that personally. We knew how good of a team we were, we know how good we are and we just wanted to show everybody tonight,” Tanner said to ESPN after the game, according to Nick Schultz of On3.
Tanner was a major player in the game with Alabama. He had a season high of 29 points, while also adding three rebounds and seven assists. This comes after Tanner had a season-high 14 assists in the game before against South Carolina. His amazing play has led Vanderbilt to a 15-0 start, but also allowed him to throw Oats' comments in his face. Before the game, Oats had some disparaging remarks for Vanderbilt.
“They’re good. They haven’t played any real, real good teams, they’ve played some high-majors, and shoot, blowing them out,” Oats said. “They’re good. The metrics say they’re good, you watch them on film, the eye test says they’re good. They’ve got a confidence about them, they’ve got good guard play. They’re smart, they’re well-coached, they’re good on both sides of the ball.”
Oats made sure to point out that Vanderbilt did not have a great strength of schedule, and while calling them good, never praised them as elite or great. Vanderbilt entered the game with the 54th-ranked strength of schedule according to KenPom. Meanwhile, Alabama came in ranked first in strength of schedule. Regardless, in the overall rankings by KenPom, Vanderbilt is fifth.
Vanderbilt will look to continue its undefeated season on Saturday aganst LSU.
