The phrase, ‘it’s a copycat league,’ gets through around by the NFL media a lot, but that’s true of most sports. Whoever is winning championships sets the meta, and you either have to adapt to it or figure out a way to beat it. In college sports, this is actually at its most extreme when it comes to roster construction because every year, every player in the sport could become a free agent.
With so much roster movement, you can quickly reshape to fit the modern-day ethos, but that demand drives the market up for those types of players. Right now, that’s bigs. Last year, Florida won with a supersized lineup, and this season, Michigan, Arizona, Duke, Illinois, and so many others followed their example of prioritizing rim dominance and rebounding to maximize possessions and easy looks.
Alabama is a long way off from that style. Nate Oats is still, and always will be, living in the variance of high-volume three-point shooting and up-tempo offense. On Monday, the day before the Transfer Portal officially opens, they get even farther with sophomore big man Aiden Sherrell announcing his intention to enter the Transfer Portal.
Aiden Sherrell will be expensive to replace
Everybody wants to match the size of Michigan, Florida, Arizona, all of the most dominant teams in the country, outside of UConn. That insatiable demand is likely what drove Sherrell to enter the portal after previously indicating that he planned to return to Alabama for his junior year. It will also make him incredibly expensive to replace.
At 6-foot-10, Sherrell was one of the most valuable rim protectors in the country, impressively anchoring Alabama’s defense with 2.2 blocks per game. As an added bonus, he is a solid three-point shooter with a blossoming offensive game. He’s the type of floor-spacing big with ball-handling and passing ability that allows teams to play with two or even three-big lineups while maintaining spacing. He’ll undoubtedly drive a steep price on the open market.
Even if Sherrell came back, Alabama still needed to add more to the front court. That’s why Oats fought so hard for Charles Bediako’s eligibility midway through the season. Now, with him gone and no obvious replacement waiting in the wings, rather than bringing in two or three bigs in an expensive market, Oats' best option might be to zag and go all-in on his five-out style.
The Transfer Portal market is setting up for someone to zag
Usually, the zag doesn’t come for years. It’s taken a long time for the NFL to circle back around to becoming a power running league. But NFL teams can’t overhaul their roster every offseason. Things move fast in college, so the market seems ripe for some team to zag the other way, building a five-out team of wings to space out the massive front courts terrorizing the sport.
It’s not just that playing with more shooting and spacing, as Dan Hurley has around one big in Tarris Reed Jr., can provide a tactical advantage; straying from the prevailing team-building meta is how you find value in the portal. That’s what the teams on the bleeding edge of this big man movement did, and as a program already built on pace and space, Oats could be the perfect coach to test that theory.
Alabama clearly needs to add more positional size than it had last year, with two small guards in Labaron Philon and Aden Holloway. Oats has displayed an understanding of that with a recruiting class of 6-foot-4 to 6-foot-5 playmaking guards and wings who can hold up in a more switchable defensive structure. Now, he just needs to add a few more in a portal market that will be obsessed with seven-footers.
Likely, Oats will still be focused on adding size, and he at least needs someone to anchor the defense and give his team a chance against teams like Michigan, which rolled his Tide in the Sweet 16. But prioritizing wing shooters might end up returning more bang for his buck in this portal market.