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00:00Mike, great to have you back here on Newswire.
00:01Really appreciate you coming on.
00:02Let's start off with Roll Tide.
00:04Another 100 points for them.
00:05This should not be a surprise.
00:07They wipe out Vandy, 103 to 87.
00:10Another nice game for Mark Sears,
00:12one of the best college basketball players in the country.
00:1421 points, 7 assists, hit most of his free throws as well.
00:19Alabama's, you know, certainly one of those teams
00:21that in the end, with the amount of points they score
00:24and when their offense is humming,
00:25they're going to be tough to beat over the next few months.
00:28Well, they were my preseason pick
00:30to win the championship, Craig.
00:32But the one thing that has to happen
00:35for them to fulfill that,
00:37and certainly they have the offensive talent to do that,
00:40is you have to be better on defense than they've been.
00:43And I'm not talking about giving up 87 points to Vandy.
00:46If you're scoring 110,
00:48the other team's going to probably score a lot.
00:50It's not really so much about that,
00:51it's how efficient you are,
00:53how effective you can be at getting big stops.
00:57I think they did a really nice job of that
00:59in the Kentucky game over the weekend.
01:02Again, you win 102 to 97.
01:06That's a huge victory over a great offensive team,
01:09but you have to have a more efficient defense
01:12than they've shown.
01:13Very few teams have gone into the NCAA tournament
01:16at the level where Alabama is
01:19on Ken Palm's defensive efficiency chart.
01:21Last time I looked, they were around 47.
01:24If you're not top 20,
01:26at least by the time you get halfway through the tournament,
01:29you're probably not going to win those last couple of games.
01:32So they've made a lot of progress with their offense.
01:34They're a great basketball team,
01:36but the defense has to be tighter as they go through.
01:40And it's not easy to do that in this league.
01:42The SEC is an amazing conference.
01:44Not going to be easy,
01:45but it also gives you the opportunity
01:47to challenge yourself constantly
01:49against teams that are elite offensively.