TUSCALOOSA, Ala.— No. 4 Alabama men’s basketball fell to No. 21 Ole Miss 74-64 at home in Coleman Coliseum on Tuesday evening. The victory for the Rebels was the first in program history against a top-5 opponent on the road.

The Crimson Tide scored its least amount of points since the Sweet 16 of the 2023 NCAA Tournament.

There’s so much to dissect from this matchup at Coleman Coliseum. Here are three takeaways:

Early Turnovers Set Tone for the Rest of the Game

The Crimson Tide finished the game with an astounding 21 turnovers––a new season-high. Head coach Nate Oats said during Tuesday’s press conference that Ole Miss consistently takes the ball away from opponents and this contest was no different. Some Alabama mishaps came from the Rebels stripping the ball away, but many of the turnovers stemmed from poor passing across the court.

Alabama forward Grant Nelson tallied five turnovers, guard Labaron Philon and forwards Jarin Stevenson and Mouhamed Dioubate each had three, guards Aden Holloway and Chris Youngblood and center Clifford Omoruyi each had two and Mark Sears gave the ball away once. In other words, every player on the floor for more than five minutes (forward Aiden Sherell played for four minutes) recorded at least one turnover.

“Our first 10 possessions we had seven turnovers,” Oats said during the postgame press conference. “We’ve been having some issues with turnovers throughout the year. This defense turns people over, and we didn’t have our guys ready to go and not turn it over…We only had 11 assists to 21 turnovers, and we just weren’t ready to go.”

These careless turnovers ruined a ton of momentum offensively, as did a variety of other factors including the Tide’s subpar 19-of-26 clip from the free-throw line and 5-of-20 from deep, among other reasons such as a lack of veteran leadership while down.

“It’s disgusting, to be honest with you,” Oats said. “It starts with me…I felt like we lost because they came ready to play. They brought energy. They brought effort. We did not. That’s a frustrating way to lose.”

One diamond in Alabama’s rough was Auburn transfer guard Aden Holloway, who scored 15 points with six rebounds and three assists. Holloway officially found and emerged into his role with the Crimson Tide as Alabama’s top option off the bench during the Texas A&M win and Tuesday night only furthered that notion.

“I thought Holloway showed pretty well,” Oats said. “I think he’s the one guy that shot it pretty well tonight. We didn’t score it very well at all, but he ended up in double figure, leading us in scoring with 15. I thought defensively, he was a little bit better than he’d been too, which was evidenced by him playing almost 30 minutes. He got more minutes than normal. But nobody was good enough for us to win this game, including the head coach, and we got to be better moving forward.”

Alabama’s Effort Indicative of Offensive Glass Numbers

The promotion for Tuesday’s game was “Blue-Collar Night.” Oats introduced a scoring system known as blue-collar points while in his second season at Buffalo in 2016-17 that measures the team’s hustle. Players are given a certain amount of non-scoreboard points for deflections, steals, blocks, rebounds, and loose balls, offensive rebounds, diving on the floor and drawing fouls.

Nevertheless, this couldn’t have been a worse night to celebrate Alabama’s blue-collar mentality that the fanbase has also embraced. The Tide was crushed in the blue-collar battle by a score of 89.5-72.5. This was perhaps most indicative with the numbers on the offensive glass.

“I told our guys in the locker room after the game, ‘We have to deserve to win, and we didn’t deserve to win this game,'” Oats said. “Ole Miss came in and they deserved to win the game. You have to deserve it with your preparation going into the game. Then you’ve got to deserve it with your effort once you’re in the game. The team that deserved to win tonight won the game tonight.”

The Crimson Tide came into the evening averaging 15.1 offensive rebounds per game––the eighth-best mark in the country. Alabama was coming off a game where they beat Texas A&M in this stat, who leads the nation on the offensive glass, so this should’ve been an even better performance.

However, Alabama hauled in just four offensive rebounds compared to Ole Miss’ nine. This translated to four second-chance points for Alabama while the Rebels tallied 12. Ole Miss forward Malik Dia, who turned in a stellar 23-point, 19-rebound and 2-block game, had the same amount of boards on the offensive glass as the Crimson Tide.

“Maybe the most disappointing thing on the night, in my opinion, was our lack of effort on the offensive glass. I don’t know if our guys didn’t realize that’s what’s been keeping our offense going,” Oats said. “We haven’t been shooting it particularly well. We’ve had too many turnovers. Our offense hasn’t been great this year, but the offensive rebounding rate’s been really saving us in some of these games.”

Crimson Tide Defense Kept Alabama in the Game

Alabama’s early turnovers could’ve very easily created a large margin on the scoreboard, but the Crimson Tide’s defense kept it in the game throughout. For reference, Ole Miss scored 19 points off of Alabama’s turnovers while the Tide recorded 10 points off of the Rebels’ despite committing triple the number of giveaways.

Ole Miss also struggled shooting the ball as it went 27-of-30 from the field (39 percent), including 6-of-21 from downtown (29 percent).

Aside from the aforementioned Malik Dia, Ole Miss’ offense didn’t have any other standouts. Four other Rebels finished in double figures but none of them scored more than 13 points. Three of these four are members of Ole Miss’ backcourt quartet, who has ran the offense this season as each of them came into this game averaging at least 10 points per contest.

The Rebels led for just 19 more seconds than Alabama did (18:17-17:58), but Ole Miss’ lead grew throughout the latter portion of the second half as the Crimson Tide’s defense could only make so many stops with practically zero momentum offensively.

Of course, this was far from a completely stout night by Alabama’s defense, but Oats didn’t give that side of the floor much trouble when discussing what went wrong.

“Defensively, we definitely had some mistakes and we should have been better, but we lost this game on the offensive end,” Oats said. “We lost the game with our turnovers, our lack of effort on the offensive glass, guys that we count on to go get offensive rebounds came through with nothing for us tonight and we’ve got to do a better job of making sure our guys mentally are ready to go and understand how tough these games are every single night out in the SEC.”

No. 4 Alabama falls to 14-3 (3-1 SEC) and will head on the road to face No. 8 Kentucky on Jan. 18.

Read More: BamaCentral Courtside: Ole Miss 74, Alabama 64