At times, existing within the shadow of one the country’s most storied football programs can be helpful for Alabama’s men’s basketball team.

That was the case for first-year Tide coach Nate Oats through a month of November in which Alabama’s marquee football games against LSU and Auburn kept attention away from the basketball team stumbling to a 2-4 start -- its worst through six games in almost 50 years.

“At least when we were losing as many games as we lost [in November], we didn’t have the full spotlight on us down here,” Oats said during an SEC coaches teleconference Thursday. “I don’t think it’s the worst thing, to be honest with you. Some of our guys can work on getting better.”

Oats’ squad has quietly improved, winning five of six games since a Thanksgiving loss to Iowa State in the Bahamas.

Alabama ranks No. 60 in the NCAA NET rankings after debuting at No. 96 on Dec. 16. The Tide has picked up wins over the past month over three current top 100 teams in Stephen F. Austin (No. 53), Richmond (No. 75) and Belmont (No. 85).

With his team having clawed to a 7-5 record, Oats will make his SEC coaching debut on Saturday in Gainesville against Florida (8-4, No. 55 in NET). The game will tip at 5 p.m. CT on ESPN2.

“Starting on the road at Florida is not going to be easy," Oats said. "They’re one of the better teams in the league, one of the most talented teams. We got our work cut out for us [but] I do like the way we’re coming, with the way we’ve been playing for the past month or so.”

Oats, who set the expectation in October for his team to make the NCAA tournament, acknowledged Thursday that his team picked up more losses in non-conference play than he anticipated. He attributed that in part to a run of injuries that included two players lost for the season, as well as three others -- Herb Jones, Alex Reese and Beetle Bolden -- banged up and missing practice time early in the schedule.

Attempting to have his team adopt a fast-paced style of offense, Oats’ players struggled with efficiency early in the season. Alabama averaged 19 turnovers per game over its 2-4 start, but that rate has dipped to 15 per game over the past six contests.

“They had to figure it out,” Oats said Thursday. “Attacking, coming down, when to attack, when not to attack -- I think that played into why we were turning over the ball way too frequently."

Oats added that he views his offense, which is averaging an SEC-best 82.8 points per game, as being closer to where he wants it than the defense, which is allowing an SEC-worst 77.7 points per game.

Even after Alabama’s football team wrapped up its season with a Citrus Bowl win Wednesday over Michigan, that sport will still receive the bulk of the attention in the state over the coming weeks because of looming NFL draft decisions from its underclassmen, including quarterback Tua Tagovailoa.

Oats, who said Thursday that he has attended football practices and sat in on Nick Saban’s staff meetings to learn from his success, is not one to complain about the dominant sport in Tuscaloosa.

“I don’t mind it,” Oats said. “I don’t have a big ego where we need to have all the attention on us.”

But using the example of Florida’s men’s basketball team winning back-to-back national championships in 2006 and 2007 at a school in which football is the preeminent sport, Oats sees room for his program to breathe.

“Alabama doesn’t have any professional sports, so college athletics here is huge,” he said. “Everybody gets behind you here, and they’ve got pretty good tradition here, so I think once we start winning ... I think you can be really good at both.”