CECIL HURT: Tide’s new coach will face task of instilling confidence

It’s hard not to feel for Philip Pearson right now.

It’s not just that he has one of the tougher coaching jobs in sports, trying to hold a program together in an interim role. He is doing that with a good understanding that — unlike Dabo Swinney’s interim football coaching gig at Clemson — he’s not auditioning for the head coaching job. He is trying to keep the University of Alabama basketball team together with essentially two motivations. First, he is a professional and professionals do their best in all circumstances. Second, he has an abiding affection for Alabama basketball that goes back to his five years as a walk-on player, if not beyond.

It’s not quite that you feel sorry for Pearson. College athletics is an unforgiving business, a zero-sum enterprise in which you have a winner and a loser every time out and get absolutely no bonus points because your team finds itself in a tough situation. It’s just that he is laboring to keep the players performing at a high level, not just play out the string on one of the most disappointing basketball seasons in Alabama history. And he’s done that, to a certain extent.

Alabama was a little overwhelmed at LSU, but in losses to Vanderbilt and, most recently, South Carolina, the Crimson Tide has been close enough at the end to win if it could have made a single basket in the final three minutes of play, something that hasn’t happened in either end-game situation.

Credit Pearson for Alabama’s continued ability to give itself a chance to win. But it’s becoming apparent that, in the rebuilding job that will follow this season, the first priority will be instilling some confidence in a team that clearly does not have any, when it comes down to close situations. There simply seemed to be no one who was willing to step up for Alabama.

Pearson recognizes that the likeliest candidate, for better or worse, is a freshman: forward JaMychal Green. On its last two offensive possessions, Alabama tried to get the ball inside to Green offensively. He got the ball with just over a minute left but was not close to the basket and did not get off a good shot. On the most critical possession, Green never got to touch the ball at all. Point guard Anthony Brock was whistled for a charging call before he could get the ball into Green’s hands.

It is certainly fair to point out that, for the better part of the past five years, Alabama’s plans revolved around one player: Ronald Steele. When he was healthy, in his first two seasons, there was no one in the SEC that was better than Steele at executing those end-game situations. He could do what Devan Downey did for South Carolina on Saturday — either make big baskets in crucial situations or, even when he didn’t, attract enough defensive attention to free up other players.

The problem is that there has not been a healthy Ronald Steele on the Crimson Tide team for three years now. For the longest time, the solution was to wait until there was a healthy Ronald Steele. In the meantime, Alabama took its lumps. In this SEC season, when there has been no Steele at all, there has been no one able to take up the slack.

College basketball is a point guard’s game in much the same way that college football is a quarterback’s game. If you have a great player who constantly has the ball in his hands, you can make outstanding things happen.

If you don’t, though, there are other ways to win. You find the best option you can and teach him to minimize mistakes. You play great defense. You rely on being more physical than the other team. (There is at least one successful head coach in the immediate area who has used just that formula.) Alabama’s basketball team doesn’t really do any of those things very well, which is not to say that Pearson doesn’t realize that his (interim) team needs to do them. It just isn’t this team’s identity. It’s unlikely to forge such an identity in its six remaining league games, no matter how hard Pearson tries.

The imminent new coach will have a number of tasks facing him, though. And changing the collective mindset will be one of the first issues he’ll have to address.

Cecil Hurt is sports editor of The Tuscaloosa News. He can be reached at cecil.hurt@tuscaloosanews.com or at 205-722-0225.