Even with the blowout loss at the hands of Kentucky, Alabama basketball head coach Nate Oats still had his wit. As he told it, the Crimson Tide had question marks defensively entering the game in Lexington.

Afterward, not so much.

“Those question marks are completely erased,” Oats said after the game. “Everybody knows that we don’t want to guard at this point.”

The Wildcats put up 117 points on Alabama, the third-most in program history.

It’s been a constant plague all season for the Crimson Tide. UA has one of the top scoring offenses in the country and, at times, a complete inability to get even one stop when it needs to.

Saturday’s game featured 1.539 points per possession for Kentucky. The second-half mark was a slight improvement over the first, though a 1.475 was hardly an exemplary effort on the part of Alabama’s defense.

Besides, Oats wasn’t putting much stock in a better effort at that point.

“Any kind of decent defense was in the last eight minutes and I thought the game was already over,” he said.

The loss had a big impact on Alabama’s SEC standings lead. The Crimson Tide dropped to 11-3 in league play, a mark Tennessee, which beat the Tide in Knoxville earlier this season, can tie with a win over Texas A&M Saturday evening.

The Tide plays the Volunteers next Saturday in Tuscaloosa, a game ESPN’s College Gameday will be in the house for. Before that, Oats’ team heads to Oxford for a Wednesday matchup with Ole Miss.

A road battle at Florida and a home tilt with Arkansas close out the regular season before the SEC tournament runs March 13-17. Alabama is running out of time to fix the defensive lapses.

After the loss, UA ranks 99th on KenPom in adjusted defensive efficiency.

“If the defense isn’t fixable, we’re not gonna be able to win any big games,” Oats said. “I don’t know that it’s fixable where it’d be like we were last year where we’re third in the country. It’s past the point of doing that.”

If Alabama is going to make a run of it in the postseason, the path to victory is simple but fraught. The Crimson Tide will likely have to blow other teams out of the gym with sterling offensive efforts.

That’s not an impossible way to win either, given UA’s firepower. Alabama put up 95, despite turning the ball over 16 times.

Still, that won’t be an easy road.

“We were a 1.17,” Oats said of his team’s points-per-possession statline, coming in low, as the Tide actually hit 1.234 for the game. “We get our defense down to a 1.1, we have a chance. I think there’s parts of it fixable. Some of it, I don’t know.”