Alabama Basketball: Iona coach Rick Pitino talks Tide and more

Alabama Basketball: Rick Pitino is an expert basketball tactician. He’ll need more than scheme to beat the Crimson Tide.

For the Iona Gaels to upset Nate Oats’ Alabama Basketball team, Rick Pitino will need wizardry. It is not that the teams are so mismatched physically. The Gaels have good athletes. Because of Pitino, they will play hard. Pitino is probably the best coach in The NCAA Tournament to scheme against Nate Oats. Pitino will need more than scheme. He must persuade his players to believe.

The big gap between the teams is the quality of competition they have battled against this season. Iona, with its COVID- shortened season, has not beaten any team as good as Arkansas, Tennessee, LSU, Florida, Missouri, and all the other opponents the Tide has beaten. Using Ken Pomeroy’s rankings, the worst team the Tide has beaten is No. 169, UNLV. The best team Iona has beaten is No. 186 Siena. Based on Pomeroy’s ratings, every team in the SEC is better than Siena.

Saturday’s game will mark the fifth straight NCAA Tournament for Iona. In the preceding four, they lost by 15 points to North Carolina, 22 points to Duke, 16 points to Oregon and 13 points to Iowa State. Not since the 2012 Big Dance have the Geals had a chance to win an NCAA Tournament game. That year, in the First Four, BYU beat Iona 78-72.

The Gaels have 14 NCAA Tournament games in their history. They have won one, in 1980, beating Holy Cross. They did come close to beating Ole Miss in 2000, losing 72-70.

Players on the 2021 Gaels roster will not be bothered by any of that history. It will be even less meaningful to Rick Pitino. What Pitino will grind over is getting his players prepared with the mental toughness to win a game, against one of college basketball’s mentally toughest teams.

On Tuesday talking about Alabama Basketball, Rick Pitino said,

"I’m not an expert on Alabama basketball history but I’d say that 1987 Alabama team and this team are the two greatest Alabama teams ever…but this team is much better on defense. They’re not going to allow us to shoot 68 percent."

Pitino’s 1987 Providence team destroyed the Crimson Tide. Not only will Pitino try to replicate the feat, he will preach to his Iona players they can be the hunters, rather than the hunted as his Friars were in 1987.

Pitino was also complimentary of the Nate Oats system of play.

"I don’t know of any high school player in the country that wouldn’t want to play in that system"

Pitino is not being kind to the Crimson Tide because C.M. Newton was his boss at Kentucky. He can play the expectations game as well as anyone. Talk publicly about how great the opponent is, while privately saying something different to his team. Different as in, the opponent is good at some things but they are vulnerable at others. Exploit those vulnerabilities and pull off the upset.

An upset is so unlikely, no one would be talking about it if Iona’s coach was not Rick Pitino.

Rick Pitino has won everywhere he has been, with 782 wins and a 73.9 winning percentage. The single exception was the six games he was an interim head coach at Hawaii in 1976.