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The college basketball coaching carousel is in full effect as the 2018-19 season is down to its final 16 teams.
Not many conferences will have more new coaches than the SEC as Arkansas, Vanderbilt, and Texas A&M are all in the process of looking for a new head coach.
But in the case of the Alabama Crimson Tide, they have found their new head coach in Buffalo’s Nate Oats, but they will have a handful of open roster spots as four players from their 2018-19 roster have entered the transfer portal, according to Jeff Goodman, who added Petty is set on leaving Tuscaloosa:
Alabama sophomore wing John Petty told me that he is transferring no matter who the Crimson Tide hire as their new coach.
— Jeff Goodman (@GoodmanHoops) March 27, 2019
The four players are Kira Lewis, Dazon Ingram, John Petty, and Daniel Giddens. Both Lewis and Petty are former recruits of John Calipari and the Kentucky Wildcats.
Lewis was a four-star point guard from the class of 2018. He chose Avery Johnson and the Tide over Calipari and the Wildcats and had offers from schools such as Kansas and Indiana.
In his freshman season at Alabama, Lewis averaged 13.5 points per game with 2.9 assists.
As for Petty, he was a four-star recruit in 2017 who chose Alabama over Kentucky, Kansas, UCONN and Florida State. He played two seasons for the Tide and averaged 10.2 points in both of his two seasons.
None of these four recruits likely will ever end up at Kentucky, as transferring within the conference is extremely rare, but Kentucky may have one less team that will be a threat to them in 2019-20 now with the Tide in complete rebuild mode.