If it wasn’t for the Hurley family, Nate Oats may have never made an impact on the University at Buffalo men’s basketball program.
As Oats took in the fact that he and the Alabama men’s basketball team had just earned a berth in the NCAA Tournament’s Final Four, he thought back to how the Hurley family set up him and the Bulls for success.
“It’s surreal,” Oats, the Crimson Tide coach, told reporters March 30 in Los Angeles. “You go back 11 years ago, and I won a state championship at (Romulus High) back in the Detroit area. It hasn’t been that long. And Bobby Hurley gives me a chance. Obviously, the Hurley family has got a lot of respect for high school coaches. Their dad’s a hall of fame coach. And I caught a few breaks.”
One of those breaks led to Oats joining the UB coaching staff, and the Bulls became the Mid-American Conference’s premier men’s basketball program under the tutelage of Hurley and Oats from 2013-19. Hurley took over the program in 2013 and hired Oats as an assistant. Hurley left for Arizona State following the 2015 season, and Oats was promoted to head coach that April.
People are also reading…
UB won four MAC Tournament titles and went to four NCAA Tournaments during those years – in 2015 with Hurley and in 2016, 2018 and 2019 with Oats. That run included an 89-68 upset of Arizona in the first round of the 2018 NCAA Tournament.
March Madness continues this week, and while there are no Big 4 teams in the NCAA men’s or women’s tournaments, there are plenty of tournament teams that have ties to Western New York.
Oats became Alabama’s head coach in March 2019, days after the Bulls lost to Texas Tech in a second-round NCAA Tournament game in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Five years later, he has the Tide men’s basketball team contending for its first national title. And he’ll face another Hurley: Bobby’s brother Dan, who is in his sixth season as UConn’s coach. The Crimson Tide (25-11) meet the Huskies (35-3), the defending national champions, in a national semifinal at 8:49 p.m. Saturday in Phoenix.
“It’s ironic I get to coach against Danny,” Oats said. “I don’t know if ‘get’ is the correct word, because they’ve got a pretty good team. But I’m in the Final Four and get to go against Danny, who helped me get in this thing. Obviously, Bobby is the one who hired me. But the two of those guys kind of came into college together and have been great to me the whole time.”
Oats and Bobby Hurley, who just completed his ninth season at Arizona State, already have been on opposing sides in the NCAA Tournament, with the Bulls defeating Hurley’s Sun Devils in a 2019 NCAA Tournament first-round game in Tulsa.
That year, though, Bobby Hurley didn’t want to create an Oats-vs.-Hurley narrative.
“Once I got myself convinced we could actually do it, then I had to convince them,” Nate Oats said.
“I think the world of Nate Oats as a coach, as a person, as for what he’s done for Buffalo basketball and how his personality rubbed off and how hard his team competes and plays the game,” Hurley said at the NCAA Tournament in 2019. “Otherwise, I’ll answer any questions at this point about Buffalo, but I’m just not going to specifically talk about me and Nate Oats because this is not about us.”
Fast forward five years. The Arizona State coach now approaches it with both levity and perspective.
“My fingerprints are all over this one, for sure,” Bobby Hurley told the Arizona Republic. “Having participated in it as a player, I know just how special it is, so I’m happy all of those guys get the chance to experience it. Whether you’re a player or a coach, you strive to win a championship, and they all have that chance.”
Oats had time to reflect on his connection to one of college basketball’s notable families led by Bob Hurley Sr., who coached St. Anthony High School in New Jersey to 26 state titles in 39 years. Yet, Oats didn’t have much time to savor beating Clemson to take the Tide to their first Final Four.
“We’ve got to figure out how to beat UConn,” he said after the win over the Tigers.
Oats already has gotten crafty, and explained last weekend that he used a third-party analytics firm to study Alabama’s first four NCAA Tournament games and help the Tide make data-driven decisions.
He also sought advice from another Alabama great: recently retired football coach Nick Saban, who won seven national championships, including six at Alabama.
“He kind of gave me the ‘next’ idea, next, next, next,” Oats told AL.com. “Guys bought in. We can make this run. Other teams have done it. We have the capability to do it. We’ve got to get back to playing great defense, or start playing great defense, I don’t know if ‘back’ is the correct word. But we can have the No. 1 offense in the country, we had it for the majority of the year. Let’s put a top-20 defense together and we can make a Final Four. And I think we did that.”
What’s next for Oats and the Tide?
A shot at playing for a national championship.