Nate Oats reacts to career growth of Bucky McMillan

New Texas A&M Aggies head coach Bucky McMillan has had a meteoric rise in coaching. That’s a journey that Alabama Crimson Tide head coach Nate Oats can relate to and is happy to see for a fellow SEC coach.

Oats shared that he’s happy for McMillan while speaking at the Regions Tradition Pro-Am. Beyond that, he feels it’s a situation that’s good for other coaches with backgrounds similar to theirs.

“I think it’s pretty cool,” Nate Oats said. “I got here, I talked to Bucky, and I talked to him even about an assistant role. Then I told him, like, ‘Look, man, you need to get to wherever you’re going to get as an assistant,’ and fortunate for him, he’s able to jump right from high school head coach. ‘Just do it on your own accord, how good as you are, and that’ll be better.’ And he did.”

For his first head coaching job, Nate Oats led Romulus High School in Michigan. He’d spend more than a decade there before jumping to college as an assistant at Buffalo. Later, he’d become the head coach there and ultimately at Alabama. Similarly, Bucky McMillan spent more than a decade as a high school coach at Mountain Brook High School in Alabama before getting a college head coaching job at Samford and now Texas A&M.

“I mean, he got to Samford, hit it out of the park. You know, me and him have talked a lot. Shoot, I’ve talked to him even a few times since he’s got to A&M. He says that the success I’ve had here, I think, helped him a little bit with just high school coaches can do it,” Oats said. “And I think it’s great for all the really good high school coaches around. I mean, he went right from high school to Samford. He hit it out of the park, and now he’s in our league.”

Oats has certainly found success in college, going to the Final Four, the Elite Eight twice, and the Sweet Sixteen four times since getting to Alabama. McMillan will hope to have similar success at Texas A&M. While at Samford, he proved capable as a college coach, going 99-52 and taking the Bulldogs to an NCAA Tournament appearance.

“So, you know, he’s going to have a former player of ours. I think I can talk about it. I won’t mention the name,” Oats said. “But play for him. I think he plays a system similar to us, you know, at least on offense, where he spreads the ball, plays pretty fast, takes a lot of threes. So, I’m really happy for him. I’ve gotten to be friends with him, and I’ll be pulling for him outside of the time he got to play us, so hopefully his offense doesn’t look that good when he plays us, but he’s done a really good job. I’m happy for him.”

The SEC hasn’t released its 2025-26 schedule yet for basketball. So, it’s going to be a little longer before Nate Oats finds out when he and Bucky McMillan are going to face off for the first time as SEC rivals.