Alabama basketball coach Nate Oats understands what’s on the line inside Coleman Coliseum on Saturday. No. 14 Alabama is in position to win its second straight SEC regular season title and a victory over No. 4 Tennessee on Saturday night will separate the Crimson Tide from the Volunteers at the top of conference standings.

Oats also understands the strength of Alabama’s opponent.

“I’m sure anything short of a Final Four run they’d be disappointed with at the end of the year,” Oats said “So it’s a really good team we got coming in here with the SEC league title on the line.”

Oats also knows that Alabama will need a much better performance against the Volunteers than it showed during Tennessee’s 91-71 drubbing of the Tide on Jan. 21. Alabama has grown since that game, putting in solid road performances against Georgia, LSU and Ole Miss to keep pace with the Volunteers. Its offense has stayed humming, having now scored at least 100 points in nine contests, which is the most by an SEC team since 1995-96.

Alabama is also playing the rematch in front of its home fans with the basketball version of ESPN’s College GameDay coming to Tuscaloosa for the first time ever. The Crimson Tide are nursing a 16-game SEC home winning streak and are 13-1 inside Coleman Coliseum this season.

Home court advantage alone won’t be enough against a deep and talented Volunteers side that game Alabama all sorts of problems in Knoxville, Tennessee. Oats made it clear what needed to change to reverse the result from earlier this season. If Alabama wants to pull off an upset — which Oats emphasized there would be no court-storm for — the Crimson Tide will need to be steady in possession after racking up turnovers in the first game and be strong in its matchups against Tennessee’s talented roster.

With first place in the SEC on the line, here’s everything you need to know about the game

Who: No. 14 Alabama (20-8, 11-4) vs. Tennessee (19-8, 6-8)

When: 7 p.m. CT, Saturday, March, 2

Where: Coleman Coliseum, Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Watch: (Play-By-Play: Dan Shulman, Analyst: Jay Bilas, Sideline Reporter: Jess Sims)

Listen: (Play-By-Play: Chris Stewart, Analyst: Bryan Passink, Sideline: Roger Hoover, Engineer: Tom Stipe)

Mark Sears: 6-foot-1, 185 pounds, junior

Stats: 20.6 ppg, 4.3 rpg, 4.1 apg, 51.1% FG, 44.3% 3-pt

Aaron Estrada: 6-foot-3, 190 pounds, graduate

Stats: 13.3 ppg, 5.3 rpg, 4.5 apg, 46.2% FG, 34.2% 3-pt

Rylan Griffen: 6-foot-6, 190 pounds, sophomore

Stats: 11.6 ppg, 3.6 rpg, 2.0 apg, 46.7% FG, 39.7% 3-pt

Jarin Stevenson:

Stats: 5.4 ppg, 2.6 rpg, 0.5 apg, 41.7% FG, 30.7% 3-pt

Grant Nelson: 6-foot-11, 230 pounds, senior

Stats: 12.3 ppg, 5.6 rpg, 1.7 apg, 49.6% FG, 27.8% 3-pt

Zakai Zeigler: 5-foot-9, 171 pounds, junior

Stats: 11.1 ppg, 2.7 rpg, 5.9 apg, 41.4% FG, 36.4% 3-pt

Santiago Vescovi: 6-foot-3, 196 pounds, fifth-year senior

Stats: 7.1 ppg, 3.8 rpg, 2.6 apg, 39.6% FG, 35.5% 3-pt

Dalton Knecht: 6-foot-6, 213 pounds, fifth-year senior

Stats: 20.8 ppg, 4.9 rpg, 1.9 apg, 48.2% FG, 41.4% 3-pt

Josiah-Jordan James: 6-foot-7, 220 pounds, fifth-year senior

Stats: 8.8 ppg, 6.0 rpg, 1.9 apg, 41.0%, 32.0% 3-pt

Jonas Aidoo: 6-foot-11, 240 pounds, senior

Stats: 12.1 ppg, 7.6 rpg, 1.0 apg, 54.4% FG, 20.0% 3-pt

When Alabama and Tennesee met in Knoxville, Alabama turned the ball over 22 times, which Tennessee turned into 23 points as it cruised to a 20-point win. The Crimson Tide struggled in possession away from home, and its lackluster defense failed to get stops in response.

When speaking to the media Friday, Oats said Alabama’s defensive and turnover issues created a cyclical pattern that gave the Tide no chance against the Volunteers. Alabama’s turnovers gave Tennesee easy points against a weak transition defense. Those scores allowed Tennessee to set its own defense and prevented Alabama from attacking in transition, which is crucial for the Tide in establishing its high-powered offense.

“If we can get stops and get out in transition and we’re going against them when their defense isn’t set, we’re a lot better off,” Oats said. “So it’s a combination of a lot, but the turnovers and the defensive, focus, intensity, physicality wasn’t there the first time.”

Alabama’s defense has been questionable at best since its first meeting with the Volunteers, but the Crimson Tide showed great improvement at taking care of the ball in its last game against Ole Miss. Alabama turned it over just eight times against the Rebels. Mark Sears played 40 minutes, while Aaron Estrada logged 38 and the pair had just a single turnover between them.

While the defense is far from perfect, Alabama has played itself back into games with short bursts of strong defending. Against Ole Miss, it was the middle portion of the game where Alabama ended the first half strong and forced five Rebels turnovers in the opening five minutes of the second half.

The Crimson Tide forced seven Volunteers turnovers during the matchup in January. If Alabama’s defense has enough effort in it to create double-digit Tennessee turnovers on its home floor, the defense-to-offense cycle that Oats alluded to could flip in favor of the home side.

Just as he did before the matchup in Knoxville, Oats made it clear that Alabama can’t solely focus on Tennessee star Dalton Knecht.

“It’s not like this is a one-man band,” Oats said… “They just took a very good team, one of the best teams in the league (and) added the leading scorer in the league to it in Knecht, and now they’ve got a team that’s primed to get a one or two seed (in the NCAA Tournament).”

Knecht scored 25 points when the two sides faced off in January. Though he’s been nearly impossible to stop since his scoring against the Tide came on a relatively inefficient 8-for-20 shooting from the field and a 1-for-6 clip from beyond the 3-point line.

The Volunteers hurt Alabama with its physicality, scoring 38 points in the paint. Alabama managed to outdo Tennesee in that category with 42, but that was largely due to the Tide’s 4-for-21 mark from 3-point range, which forced it to rely on paint touches to get points.

Since that game, Alabama has shown it can turn to paint scoring. It outscored Florida 56-40 in the lane on a night where it shot 25% from 3. It outscored Ole Miss 40-28, relying on paint touches early before getting hot from deep.

Those trends of strong paint performances will have to be carried over. Grant Nelson will need to avenge his forgettable outing against the Volunteers, where he fouled out with just three points.

Alabama will also need another good performance from Nick Pringle, who was suspended for the first game against Tennessee. Friday, Oats gave credit to Pringle for raising his game. He has been in double figures in the last three games, including 10 points and five rebounds against Ole Miss.

Pringle, Nelson and the rest of Alabama’s frontcourt will need to carry that momentum against Tennessee’s Jonas Aidoo. The junior was a matchup nightmare in Knoxville, going for 19 points, five rebounds and four blocks.

“Our frontcourt guys just gotta be a little tougher,” Oats said. They got ducked in all night (against Tennessee) and Aidoo’s big and he’s good but we’ve got to make it a little harder, and our guards gotta do a little better job not letting the guards get so deep and making it easy to just drop the ball in like they did last time.”

To counter Aidoo, Oats said Alabama revisited how it defended talented bigs during nonconference play. Oats referenced the Tide’s games against Purdue’s Zach Edey, Creghton’s Ryan Kalkbrenner and Arizona’s Oumar Ballo. In the rematch with Aidoo, Oats said Alabama will look to execute traps from both the baseline and the top of the key.

Ahead of Alabama’s biggest game of the season, Oats has also raised his expectations for the Crimson Tide’s freshmen.

“Some of our younger kids have grown up a little more,” Oats said. “I told our freshmen ‘it’s March now. We don’t need you to be acting like freshmen. You need to look a lot more like sophomores. You played a whole season of basketball and gotten a lot of reps.”’

No matter how much experience a player has, the Crimson Tide will need all the help it can get against a strong Volunteers side. While Alabama’s frontcourt hones in on Aidoo, its backcourt will be focused on making life difficult for Knecht, as well as Tennessee guards Zakai Zeigler and Santiago Vescovi. The pair’s experience gives the Volunteers stability in the bacourt. Vescovi is in his fifth season with Tennessee, while Zeigler averages 5.9 assists per game which leads the conference.