Alabama and Kentucky had similar profiles. Why is Bama playing while the Wildcats watch?

Electric as Kentucky could be on the basketball court this season, the fear all along was that the Wildcats’ defense would prevent them from making a deep NCAA Tournament run.

UK’s porous D was brought up time and again over the past few months. By coaches, reporters, outside observers and the players themselves. A particularly damning stat — no team in 20 years had finished in the Final Four with a KenPom adjusted defensive efficiency rating outside the national top 100 — was evidence that this Kentucky postseason might’ve been doomed before it even started.

But the same could be said for Alabama.

In fact, Crimson Tide coach Nate Oats said it himself on multiple occasions, hitting the point especially hard after UK ran his team out of Rupp Arena in a 117-95 beatdown on Feb. 24.

“I told our guys after the game that we’ve had question marks about our defense all year,” Oats said that day. “Those question marks are completely erased. Everybody knows that we don’t really guard at this point. I thought our effort stunk.”

The analytically driven head coach — a former high school math teacher — spent much of that postgame press conference rattling off numbers that showed just how poorly his team had played defense.

“Any kind of decent defense was played in the last eight minutes, when I thought the game was already over,” Oats said of the 22-point loss that wasn’t even that close. “… There’s not a whole lot of positives about this. The only positive thing is we’ve played well enough on offense through the course of the year to be tied for first place after that horrendous effort. We’ve got four games left, and we’ve got to try and figure out how to get these guys a little more motivated to play harder on defense.”

At that point — 27 games into Alabama’s season — the outlook was especially harsh, even as the Tide sat atop the SEC standings.

“If the defense isn’t fixable, we’re not going to be able to win any big games,” Oats said.

Well, they ended up winning some big games.

Going into this weekend’s Final Four, the profiles of Kentucky and Alabama look pretty much the same. KenPom has the Cats at No. 7 in adjusted offensive efficiency and No. 110 in adjusted defensive efficiency. The website ranks Bama at No. 3 in the first stat and No. 104 in the second.

But the Crimson Tide will be playing Saturday night. And John Calipari’s Wildcats will be more than two weeks into their offseason by the time Alabama and UConn tip things off in Phoenix.

What happened?

Here were the first words out of Oats’ mouth to begin his postgame press conference following Bama’s win over Clemson in the Elite Eight last weekend:

“I couldn’t be more proud of a group of guys,” he said. “We challenged them at the beginning of this tournament that we’re going to have to pick up our defense, and our defense got significantly better.”

“Significantly” is a stretch. The numbers say that Alabama’s defense was still far from elite — in three of its four NCAA Tournament games, at the very least — but the game-by-game metrics show that the Tide’s D was just good enough to give them a chance. And with Alabama’s overpowering offense, that’s all that was needed to make this run.

Bama goes into this weekend averaging 90.6 points per game — best in the country, and one spot ahead of Kentucky, which finished the season at 89.0 points per game. UK led the nation by shooting 40.9% from 3-point range, and Bama sits second nationally with an average of 11.2 made 3-pointers per game.

In the NCAA Tournament, the Crimson Tide have been even better from 3-point range. And in Kentucky’s one March Madness game, the Cats mostly failed to connect.

Alabama is shooting 48-of-116 on 3-pointers during this NCAA Tournament run. That’s an average of 12.0 makes per game and a hit rate of 41.4%. Both numbers would have led all of college basketball over the course of this season. In their two regional games last week, the Tide shot it even better: making 13.5 3-pointers per game and hitting at 43.5%. (Bama was shooting 36.5% from deep entering the NCAA Tournament.)

Kentucky, meanwhile, had one of its worst offensive showings of the season in its 80-76 loss to 14-seeded Oakland in the first round. The Cats shot 42.6% from the field and made just nine of 28 attempts from 3-point range (only 32.1%).

To make matters worse, UK’s defense lived down to its reputation that night in Pittsburgh. According to the Torvik game-by-game ratings, the loss to Oakland counted as the Wildcats’ sixth-worst showing of the season, in terms of adjusted defensive efficiency.

Kentucky’s “game score” — another measure within the Torvik ratings — for the Oakland matchup was a 49, the fourth-worst of the 2023-24 schedule behind only the lopsided loss at South Carolina, a win over Texas A&M Commerce during the first week of the season, and the stunning home loss to UNC Wilmington.

Alabama, meanwhile, has had a game score in the 90s in all four of its NCAA Tournament outings, the team’s only such run since the first four games of the season.

In Kentucky’s case, its electric offense had an off night against Oakland’s funky zone, and a bad defense played poorly, an effort that included letting Jack Gohlke go off from deep. The combination sent the Cats home early.

In Alabama’s case, its defense solidified just enough to give the offense room to cook. And that’s been a winning combination. Bama’s offense has been outstanding in three of its four tournament games. The outlier was a 72-61 win over 12-seeded Grand Canyon in the second round, but the Tide’s D stepped up in that game. The Torvik ratings gave Alabama its fourth-best adjusted defensive efficiency rating of the season in that one, and the team’s best number in that category in more than two months.

“Guys bought in. We can make this run,” Oats said after the Clemson game, rehashing the pre-tournament message. “... We’ve got to get back to playing great defense — or start playing great defense; I don’t know if ‘back’ is the correct word. But we can have the No. 1 offense in the country. We had it for the majority of the year. Let’s put a top-20 defense together and we can make a Final Four. And I think we did that.”

What they did was put together a defense good enough to get to this point. The numbers say it still didn’t live up to “top 20” label, but it was an achievement in itself.

Alabama is now just the second team in the KenPom era — dating back to the 1996-97 season — to make the Final Four with an adjusted defensive efficiency rating outside the national top 100. The other was Marquette, which was 109th in 2003. Only three other Final Four teams in the past 20 NCAA Tournaments have finished outside the top 50 in adjusted defensive efficiency: Miami (99th in 2023), VCU (78th in 2011) and Texas (58th in 2003).

Add Alabama to the list of outliers. Add Kentucky to the much longer list of teams that have struggled defensively all season and then failed to go anywhere in March.

Aside from their actual postseason results, there is another notable difference between Kentucky’s and Alabama’s profiles. The Cats, obviously, relied on younger players this season, most of them freshmen. And while much has been made of the Tide’s roster turnover from last year, five of Bama’s top six players are seniors. And three of those top six players were in the program last season, when Oats’ team earned the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament.

There were those who wondered — some louder than others — whether a team that relies on the 3-point shot as much as Alabama has under Oats could ever really make a sustained run through the NCAA Tournament, where cold nights are bound to happen. Those thoughts seemed justified last year, when the Tide went 3-for-27 from deep in a Sweet 16 loss to San Diego State.

Bama’s offense isn’t totally built on 3-pointers, as Oats often has to point out. It’s all about doing the math and finding the best shots: good-looking 3s from players who can make them and attempts at the rim.

Oats was asked last weekend if his system had been vindicated after clinching a Final Four spot.

“That’s a great question,” he said. “Because a lot of people question: can you win big in March shooting all the 3s you shoot? How many did we shoot tonight? For all the naysayers, is 36 too many? Sixteen out of 36 ain’t bad. Forty-eight points from the 3-point line ain’t too bad. So, look, it’s not — here’s the thing people don’t understand: we’re not trying to shoot 50 3s. We’re trying to take the most efficient shots we can.

“I think you can win playing this way. They win playing this way in the NBA. We’ve just proven you can make a Final Four run.”

And they got just enough stops to make it happen.

Men’s Final Four

Saturday at Glendale, Ariz.

6:09 p.m.: North Carolina State (26-14) vs. Purdue (33-4), TBS

8:49 p.m.: Alabama (25-11) vs. Connecticut (35-3), TBS

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