The Alabama men’s basketball team’s season ended Wednesday night with an 80-79 overtime loss to Norfolk State in the first round of the NIT. The No. 8 seed traveled to Tuscaloosa, Ala., and handed the No. 1 seed an early first-round exit on its home floor at Coleman Coliseum.

Following the game, fourth-year head coach Avery Johnson said he met with athletic director Greg Byrne for an hour on Saturday about the season and his plans to fix some of the team’s problems.

“We shared some ideas of how we can get better,” Johnson said.

Alabama (18-16, 8-10 SEC) ended the 2018-19 season by losing five of its final six games, and the energy of the players was lacking down the final stretch. That was even more obvious in the first game of the NIT, as even Norfolk State’s players noticed little enthusiasm in warmups.

Because of that, fans have called for Johnson’s job after a rocky end to the season. During his postgame press conference, the head coach was asked about his investment to the Crimson Tide.

“I love being the coach here at Alabama,” Johnson said. “That’s my plan. I’ve made that crystal clear to Greg in our meeting, and hopefully, they feel the same way. But I’m committed to it. I still have time left, obviously, on my contract. And when I came to Alabama, I had other options, but I wanted to make a commitment to helping develop and help kids and help some of them become first-generation graduates from college, help some make it to the NBA. We’ve done both of those things. Help this team make it to the NCAA Tournament and advance. We’ve done that.

“So yeah, we had a little bit of a setback this year, and I know this is a microwave era where it’s always, ‘blow the team up, blow the staff up,’ when you don’t get the results you want. But when you don’t get the results you want, you just work hard. I feel we have the right people, we have a nice recruiting class coming in. But we just have to get better, we got to get better. And hopefully, we’ll have that opportunity.”

Johnson has posted a 75-62 (34-38 SEC) record in his four years at Alabama. For comparison, the Tide’s last head coach, Anthony Grant, had an 86-52 (39-27) record in the same amount of time.

Facing questions about the loss and the future after the third defeat in the NIT’s first round of his tenure, Johson was asked to assess the progress of the Tide basketball program after four years.

“This year, obviously, we kind of flat-lined a little bit and we wanted to take a step forward,” Johnson said. “I had talked about that all in the offseason, and a step forward would have meant making it to the tournament with another opportunity to advance. But things happen, and whether you don’t make it to the tournament or whether you’re another sport and you lose in the first round of your tournament or lost in the second round, you’ve got to come back and work. We’ve got a lot of work to do. So, we don’t think it’s all a failure just because we didn’t make it to the tournament, and we have work to do.

“And I know more about this team, I know more about coaching in college after my fourth year. This is not my 14th year at Alabama, it’s just the fourth year. But we wanted to have better results. I am not hiding from that. And I’m very disappointed with the loss tonight, and I’m disappointed we couldn’t take that step forward. But we’ll figure out how to do that, and we have some ideas as staff.”

Contact Charlie Potter by 247Sports' personal messaging or on Twitter (@Charlie_Potter).

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