Nate Oats and Alabama basketball took down visiting Texas A&M 100-75 on Saturday, the Crimson Tide's eighth game this season with at least 100 points.

With that, No. 15 Alabama advanced to 18-7 on the season and 10-2 in SEC play, holding on to the top spot in the conference standings. On hand to witness Saturday's victory: recently retired college football coach Nick Saban, who Oats said spoke to the team on Friday.

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“He is, to me, maybe the best team coach of any team sport in modern college sports history, and he’s right here,” Oats said after Saturday's game. “I talked to him shortly after he retired, he told me when he was going to come back to town and I asked him if he wouldn’t mind speaking to the team when he came back to town.

“So this was in the window. We kind of had a week off between games, and I thought it’d be good for our guys to hear from a respected coach like him on what took to win. He was great. He churned out NFL players. He’s great. He said, ‘I don’t know much about basketball, but here’s what I can apply from football.’ I thought he was really good."

Saban's message to the basketball team must have stuck with the players. The Crimson Tide as a team shot 52.1% from the field and 43.9% from 3-point range. Five Alabama players scored in double figures in Saturday's game, including four of the Crimson Tide's starters.

Mark Sears, who scored a game-high 23 points on 8-of-14 shooting, said Saban spoke about doing what it takes to win:

“He talked about being a beast," Sears said after the game. "Everybody wants to win, but nobody really wants to do what it takes to win. That’s something that I really looked for and took from him."

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Rylan Griffen (17 points on 6-of-13 shooting) also spoke about Saban's commitment to winning habits, regardless of sport. Saban, of course, won seven national championships (six at Alabama) and produced 123 NFL draft picks, including 44 in the first round, in his 17 seasons as the Crimson Tide's football coach.

“He’s had a bunch of successful teams, so he told us what he tells those teams. He just said he’s coached a lot of pros — different sports but same idea. So he just said, like, ‘What do you want to do to get to where you want to go?’ When he speaks, you just take everything in because he’s a legend, a living legend. So you just take everything he says in and apply it to your own personal life.

“He talked about building better habits, being disciplined and stuff like that. The same stuff he’s always really talked about, but it’s just whenever it’s in front of your face, you take it in more and you take it a lot more seriously. Very appreciative that he came, and I was glad I was able to see him speak in front of my face.”

Latrell Wrightsell Jr. echoed Sears and Griffen's sentiments in speaking about Saban's message:

“He gave us a Kobe (Bryant) story. Kobe came and spoke to the team about a year ago, two years ago before he passed away, and he just gave us a story that stuck with us, all of us, basically. Being a beast. What Rylan said, too: How do you want to get there? How do you want to do it? Everybody does something, but they don’t know what it takes to actually be one of the greats.

"And for him to give us that story was a blessing for us, and then also to have him come speak, we just take it and just run with that.”

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: What Nick Saban told Alabama basketball, Nate Oats before Texas A&M game