I don't like to do it, so forgive me a football reference about the basketball team for one second. Nick Saban used to say that the earmark of an *** whooping was when you played a road game and you looked up with a few minutes to go and the stands were empty.
For the second straight road game, Alabama basketball emptied the stands early. Unlike the game against Arkansas on Saturday, they didn't let Texas crawl back into the game and put the result in doubt. Instead, the Crimson Tide sprinted out to an 18-point halftime lead and kept its distance from the Longhorns, never allowing them to cut the lead below 14 points in the second half en route to a 23-point victory in Austin.
It was one of Alabama's most complete performances of the season. The Crimson Tide shot the lights out, connecting on 17-of-29 from three-point land and putting up shooting splits of 62/59/90, overwhelming Texas with ruthless efficiency.
Those kind of shooting numbers will play anywhere. Being able to do that on the road against a quality opponent in the best league in the land, well, that's something special.
Any good team can win games at home. The line that separates the good from the great and truly elite is the ability to go on the road and handle business. Winning road games is supposed to be difficult. Alabama has made it look like anything but this season and its ability to perform well away from Coleman Coliseum breeds confidence that this team can do some damage in March.
With the win over Texas on Tuesday, the Crimson Tide is now 8-1 in true road games this season, including a 6-0 mark in SEC play. Alabama got a reality check, they got exposed as Nate Oats likes to say, in their first road game of the season in West Lafayette against Purdue. But the reason Oats loves scheduling tough out-of-conference games is that it makes you battle-tested when the games start to count for more.
Alabama has won its last eight road games since losing to Purdue. They've won in tough environments. They did it in Chapel Hill and Lexington, Starkville and College Station, and most recently the two-game road trip to Fayetteville and Austin.
Why has Alabama been so good on the road? Oats credits it to a villain mentality.
"They tend to like to the road, for whatever reason," said Oats after the game. "They like seeing the stands empty early when they can. They seem to embrace it in a villain role, if you will, going in, knocking some teams off on the road."
The road ahead for Alabama
We've discussed at length Alabama's "back nine" in conference and its brutal nature. Five of the Tide's final nine games were on the road, including the first two of that nine-game stretch. Banking wins in both is massive as Alabama faces more difficult opponents in its final seven games, but four of them will take place at Coleman Coliseum.
Texas would have been an easy opponent for Alabama to overlook. The Tide has been on the road since traveling to Arkansas on Friday of last week. With the short turnaround between games (Saturday to Tuesday), Oats chose to keep the Crimson Tide on the road over the weekend instead of bringing them back to Tuscaloosa.
If Alabama is going to play like that, then maybe they should live out of hotel rooms for the rest of the season.
All eyes are now on Saturday's showdown with Auburn in the first No. 1 vs. No. 2 game in the history of SEC basketball. Auburn similarly handled its business and avoided a potential trap game in Nashville by earning a double-digit win over a good Vanderbilt team.
Alabama's final seven games all come against teams ranked in this week's AP Poll:
vs. No. 1 Auburn
at No. 21 Missouri
vs. No. 15 Kentucky
vs. No. 22 Mississippi State
at No. 5 Tennessee
vs. No. 3 Florida
at No. 1 Auburn
There's not a more challenging schedule in the country than what stands in front of Oats and the Crimson Tide. The good news is that Alabama seems to be playing its best basketball, just in time.