SEC Championship Victory Thread: Alabama 82, Aggies 63

The best team in Alabama basketball history completed its conference mission today, blowing out the second seeded Texas A&M Aggies to bring home their second SEC Tournament title in three seasons.

Things started off super promising for the Tide. Mark Sears, who has been struggling, opened the game with a three pointer and for the first ten minutes of action Alabama was cooking. Threes were dropping, the defense was outstanding, and Alabama opened up a 15 point lead. Jahvon Quinerly was the scoring star in the first half with 13, and Charles Bediako was a force on defense while also grabbing 8 boards to go with 6 points. Brandon Miller had 8 points and 6 rebounds but picked up three fouls, and his shooting was uncharacteristically off. He and Noah Clowney both missed a long stretch due to foul trouble.

The Aggies managed to slow the bleeding a bit late in the half, slowing the Tide down to a more manageable pace which led to a few stops. Still, the Tide went into the locker room up 34-23 and looking like the better team.

The Aggies came out of the locker room motivated on the defensive end to start the second half, but they couldn’t really cut into the lead thanks to some outstanding work on the offensive glass by the Tide. Miller finally found his stroke with about ten minutes to play, took things over as he did all tournament and the game quickly became a rout. A few emphatic dunks down the stretch provided the exclamation point, and Alabama cut down a second set of nets on the season.

The team has bigger goals, of course. They are going to be a 1-seed in the NCAA tournament, it’s just a matter of whether they have impressed the committee enough to be the top overall seed. We will find that out in a couple of hours.

Enjoy this one, folks. We may not see a team like this one for some time.

Roll Tide.