CLEVELAND — A year after the first Final Four trip in program history, the opportunity for a fourth Sweet 16 berth in five seasons is still out there for Alabama in this edition of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
Though not without a little trouble in the round of 64 for the East Region’s No. 2 seed — and with no small credit due to a surge of second-half scoring by fifth-year senior guard Mark Sears, as well as some key contributions from other members of the Crimson Tide.
Sears, an AP All-America first-team selection earlier this week, scored 19 of his 22 points after halftime to help Alabama pull away late in a 90-81 escape of 15th-seeded Robert Morris University in a first-round game Friday at Rocket Arena, the home of the NBA’s Cavaliers.
The Colonials (26-9), the Horizon League regular-season and tournament champions from Moon Township, Pennsylvania, gave their Southeastern Conference opponent all it could handle, taking their first lead at 65-64 on a layup by Josh Omojafo to bring the crowd to its feet.
Alabama (27-8) responded behind Sears, who had seven points during an 11-2 surge that gave his team some breathing room against a 22 1/2 point underdog.
“Kept playing the right way, and then the game repaid me back,” said Sears, who also grabbed five rebounds and handed out 10 of Alabama’s 25 assists.
Indeed, both Sears — an Alabama native who played his first two college seasons at Ohio University before transferring to Tuscaloosa in 2022 — and the Tide gathered themselves to advance to a second-round game Sunday against Saint Mary’s College of California.
“We’ve been in these positions all season and last year,” said Tide sophomore forward Mouhamed Dioubate, who tallied 18 points and 10 rebounds in 21 foul-plagued minutes. “… We’ve been here before, so we’ve seen this before.”
Cleveland native Amarion Dickerson led the Colonials with 25 points, including a spectacular sequence in the second half in which the 6-foot-7 junior put together a series of athletic buckets that helped erase a 10-point deficit. Dickerson added nine rebounds, and his six offensive boards were one more than the Tide had as a team.
“He seemed to be everywhere when we needed a play,” Robert Morris coach Andy Toole said. “We were down 10. He went on his little personal run there and got us back into that game, and I don’t think anybody that was associated with Robert Morris basketball is surprised by it one bit.”
It was all scary enough for Alabama that forward Grant Nelson, whose playing status was a game-time decision due to a knee injury, made his first appearance midway through the second half in hopes of finally putting the Colonials away. Nelson’s two-handed dunk with just more than two minutes left pushed the lead back to double digits.
“We didn’t play as well as we had hoped,” Tide coach Nate Oats said, “and Grant was like, ‘We’re not going home; put me in.'”
Nelson finished with five points and three rebounds in seven minutes, Alabama center Clifford Omoruyi had a season-high 17 points on 8-for-8 shooting — most of them dunks against the smaller Colonials — and the nation’s highest-scoring team reached the 90-point mark for the 19th time this season.