They almost got Iowa State in a hostile environment. They should have gotten Wichita State on the road. Alabama has shown significant improvement after last season’s disappointment, but the Crimson Tide have yet to secure a marquee win that will enhance their NCAA Tournament resume. Later today Alabama will have the opportunity to make those near-misses away from Tuscaloosa become a distant memory as it welcomes the country’s best to Coleman Coliseum. Kentucky righted its ship on Tuesday with a 49-point home victory over Missouri, while Alabama fell two points short at South Carolina. Still, after thumping Texas A&M at home to start conference play and throttling Tennessee in one of the season’s most impressive defensive performances, the Crimson Tide have to be a bit optimistic as the Wildcats come to town. It’s the first of two games the teams will play in a 15-day period.
Alabama came into the season with a number of unknowns – not the least of which was whether head coach Anthony Grant’s job could be saved – but so far it has performed beyond expectations and wiped away what was nothing less than an awful 2013-14 season. It currently sits 44th in the RPI and 37th in KenPom, thanks mostly to its improvement on the defensive end as well as better leadership. Whether the Crimson Tide can put it all together against the Wildcats remains to be seen, but there is reason for the hope that they can pull off the upset. While Kentucky has an even-bigger-than-normal size advantage against them, Alabama is very athletic and has done an excellent job with its three-point defense. The Wildcats’ biggest weakness has been their ineffectiveness from the perimeter, so it is incumbent upon the Crimson Tide to force Kentucky to score from beyond the arc.
Alabama’s senior leaders, Rodney Cooper and Levi Randolph, were forced into more prominent roles upon the graduation of Trevor Releford and Shannon Hale, and they have responded well beyond what Grant could have hoped for. Prior to the season, many thought it was a mere formality that the team would struggle and that Grant would ultimately lose his job. Instead, after the team’s solid performance against Iowa State in Kansas City in the season’s fourth game and the gut-wrenching one-point loss at Wichita State, it was apparent that something was different about this year’s team. At 12-4, Alabama has positioned itself to make a run at the NCAA Tournament. But doing that will not be easy. After Saturday’s game, the Crimson Tide travels to Arkansas, gets a home game with Auburn, then Florida comes to Tuscaloosa, and they finish the month with a return trip to Rupp Arena. Clearly, the next five games could make or break Grant’s team, so pulling off the upset would do wonders for boosting the team’s chances.
Kentucky has shown that it is vulnerable since conference play began. Alabama is a certainly a more worthy opponent than Ole Miss, which took the Wildcats to overtime in Lexington, and Texas A&M, which nearly pulled off a double-overtime shocker in College Station. But as their subsequent performance against Missouri showed, those two close games apparently got the Wildcats’ attention, and Alabama should not expect to catch Kentucky napping. Still, if it wants to punch its ticket to March Madness, it will not have a better opportunity than Saturday’s visit from the Wildcats to do just that.