It's easy enough to say the 2023-24 Alabama basketball season has been coach Nate Oats' finest work in his five years as its coach. That's the only conclusion to draw after Thursday's 89-87 upset of North Carolina in Los Angeles, which has vaulted the Crimson Tide into the NCAA Tournament's Elite Eight for just the second time in program history.

But at this point, it's not even close.

As UA prepares for a rematch against Clemson on Saturday, it shouldn't go unrecognized just how unlikely this tournament run has been from any number of standpoints. Oats has managed to engineer a complete turnaround of a Crimson Tide team that looked anything but NCAA Tournament-ready just a couple weeks ago when it bowed out of the SEC tourney. But jamming on a hard brake to stop all that bad momentum, and reversing it for three consecutive March Madness wins, only scratches the surface of Oats' wizardry with this team.

It's now gone farther in the postseason than the plainly more talented Alabama team of last year did; it won't have two first-round NBA Draft picks like its predecessor.

It was decimated by not only the draft, but the transfer portal as well, and returned only Mark Sears, Rylan Griffen and Nick Pringle. With 10 scholarships to give, including incoming freshmen, Oats rebuilt it by attracting quality additions from such faraway precincts as Hofstra (Aaron Estrada), Cal State Fullerton (Latrell Wrightsell) and North Dakota State (Grant Nelson). And he did it with NIL resources that, compared to other top basketball programs, was a shoestring budget.

It's neither a surprise nor a secret that the football dog eats first at Alabama's NIL bowl, and goes back for seconds. That's not to say Oats has nothing to work with when it comes to NIL, but know this much: he's doing more with less.

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The UA defense has been suspect all season, vacillating between poor and average for the most part. That was supposed to be this team's undoing, but halfway through the NCAA Tournament, nobody's been able to exploit it well enough to eliminate the Crimson Tide.

Then there was the full reconstruction of a coaching staff that briefly left Oats without any assistants when Antoine Pettway, Ryan Hodgson and Charlie Henry took head coaching jobs at Kennesaw State, Arkansas State and Georgia Southern, respectively. Throw in the unexpected losses of center Charles Bediako to the NBA draft (he went unselected) and Jahvon Quinerly, who transferred to Memphis, and a large chunk of the credit for Alabama's return to the Elite Eight, after a 20-year absence, can be traced right back to the head coach.

On Thursday, Nelson's late heroics lifted Alabama much the way Mo Dioubate's did in a second-round win over Grand Canyon, although Nelson's final stat line – 24 points, 12 rebounds, five blocks – stood alone. Beyond question, it was his best game of the season, delivered with the timing of the team's biggest challenge.

Star point guard Mark Sears, according to Oats, wanted the ball in Nelson's hands when it mattered most.

"I went to (Sears) when we were down there late, and I said, 'What do we have to run?' He said 'Forget it, man. Get it to Grant. Grant's cooking, let's go with Grant and let's roll,'" Oats said. "When you've got your leading scorer and best player telling you to run plays for somebody else on the team … we use the word mudita a lot. We stole it from coach (Patrick) Murphy with softball. That's the definition of mudita. Vicarious joy through Grant's great game."

There's no other way to summarize this season of Alabama basketball than as an incredible overachievement. Athletics director Greg Byrne did the right thing by the program in extending Oats' contract recently, for the second time in 13 months, to make him one of the highest-paid coaches in the country. Then he stacked the buyout sandbags $18 million high to wall Oats off from a better deal.

Alabama fans waited a long time, almost 20 years, for a consistent winner on the hardwood. Oats has brought them that, and more.

He's a keeper.

And this season has proved it like no other.

Tuscaloosa News columnist Chase Goodbread is also the weekly co-host of Crimson Cover TV on WVUA-23. Reach him at cgoodbread@gannett.com. Follow on Twitter @chasegoodbread.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Alabama basketball in the Elite Eight proves Nate Oats is an elite coach