This was the mantra believed and hopelessly stated by many Alabama basketball fans over the past decade-plus. For me, growing up in Alabama, it’s been the assumption for as long as I’ve been following the sport.
Now, to date myself, I wasn’t around for C.M. Newton’s 1976 squad that lost to Indiana. Nor was I able to witness Wimp Sanderson’s stellar success in the SEC and his steadfast ability to make the Sweet 16. When I was born, Mark Gottfried was the head coach. So while this column may be pandering to a younger audience, these are my experiences having followed Alabama basketball.
Anthony Grant was the new face on the block around the time I started following the sport, and throughout Grant and his successor Avery Johnson’s eras in Tuscaloosa, they were infamous for late-season disappointment.
In Grant’s time, he fielded multiple teams that were arguably NCAA Tournament-worthy, but Selection Sunday was filled with dread year after year. Grant’s 2011 and 2013 teams featured high win totals but were snubbed from the Big Dance. In 2012, Grant got the Crimson Tide to the tournament as a 9-seed, but lost at the hands of a no-call on Trevor Releford’s last-second shot attempt.
Good thing happened, bad thing followed.
After Alabama moved on from Grant, former NBA champion and NBA Coach of the Year Avery Johnson was brought in, and he reinvigorated the program with some excitement. “Buckle Up” was his catchphrase, and it was plastered all over every crimson piece of basketball merch you could find in the Coleman Coliseum concourse.
But three letters defined Johnson’s tenure: N-I-T.
If they released betting odds for NIT berths at the beginning of each year, even getting Alabama as good as +100 from 2016-2019 would have had you laughing all the way to the bank. The Coleman Coliseum event staff might as well have permanently stamped the old (and better) NIT logo on the court to save themselves the trouble of re-adding it every March.
