NASHVILLE — After an SEC quarterfinal win on Friday, the first question for Alabama star Brandon Miller at the postgame news conference was about a teammate blocking five shots on his birthday. The next question: Brandon, given your involvement on some level in a fatal shooting, how do you reconcile not missing any playing time? “Respectfully,” Miller said, “I’m not going to be able to say.” That was one of two go-to lines he had prepared for what everyone knew would be an extremely awkward week. A follow-up Friday brought out Miller’s second canned answer: “Just really leaning on my teammates.”
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The next question for Miller was about turnovers, and the one after that was about his former teammate, Darius Miles, and Miles’ friend Michael Davis, being indicted that day on capital murder charges. “Again,” Miller said, “I’m not going to be able to say.” Miller and teammate Jaden Bradley have been interviewed as witnesses in that case and police say Miller transported the gun, which allegedly belonged to Miles, that was used to kill 23-year-old Jamea Jonae Harris near campus on Jan. 15. Miles was immediately dismissed from the team, but Miller and Bradley have continued to compete for the Crimson Tide without interruption. That controversial decision, multiple public-relations flubs in the aftermath and the fact that Alabama might just be the best team — and Miller the best player — in all of college basketball has led to this.
From now until the Tide’s season ends, what people ask, say and think about them will whiplash between basketball, legal questions and an ethical dilemma. As Alabama begins play in the NCAA Tournament as the No. 1 overall seed, a favorite to make the program’s first Final Four, the volume on this question will only grow louder: How, exactly, should people feel about the Alabama Crimson Tide and their All-America freshman?
Miller, a top-five NBA Draft talent this June, missed 10 of his first 11 shots in the championship game Sunday, then dominated the second half, finishing with 23 points, 12 rebounds, four assists, four made 3-pointers and three steals, checking out of another blowout victory to a loud ovation with 2:10 to go. He was named the SEC tournament MVP.
After Alabama’s semifinal win here on Saturday, sandwiched between questions about how great SEC basketball is and how much coach Nate Oats loves 3-pointers, a New York Times reporter asked Oats which of his players own guns and whether they’re required to be registered with the athletic department. “To my knowledge, not one of them has a gun now,” Oats said. There was no follow-up, try as the reporter might, because the woman in charge of the microphone wrestled it away from him. Later that evening, the SEC admonished two fans who showed up Saturday wearing T-shirts with an Alabama logo on the front and a tasteless slogan on the back: KILLIN’ OUR WAY THROUGH THE SEC IN ‘23.
Went up to the guy wearing the “Killing our way through the SEC shirt” and he told me to “Get the fuck out of my face.”
Claimed that he was, in fact, a Bama fan and would be back for tomorrow’s game. pic.twitter.com/y6u1NEv6Jp
— John Talty (@JTalty) March 11, 2023
Back in the Alabama locker room, a university lawyer and PR specialist both hovered with furrowed brows while, in a move that they had advised against, Oats spoke to The Athletic about what the last few weeks have been like and the strange, uncomfortable weeks that lie ahead. He knows what is coming.
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“The longer we keep winning, the more questions you’re going to be asked,” he said. “But I’ve kind of approached it this way with the team: We all know who we are in this room. We’re a really good group of guys. The world thinks something different right now. But the longer we play, the more they see of us, the better chance we have to show the world what kind of guys we really are. We know who we are. I’m proud of our guys, on and off the court. Our guys haven’t done anything wrong. The current group of guys we have are good. We’ve been thrown into a tough situation and I think our guys are handling the media pressure fairly well. And if I take the brunt of it, that’s fine.”
Oats says he knows that Alabama did itself no favors in the early messaging after it was revealed in pretrial testimony that Miller and Bradley were at the scene, and that Miles had texted Miller the night of the shooting to ask him to bring the gun. Miller’s lawyer has since claimed that Miller was already on his way to pick up Miles when that text was sent and “Brandon never touched the gun, was not involved in its exchange to Mr. Davis in any way, and never knew that illegal activity involving the gun would occur.” Still, when Oats said Miller was simply in the “wrong spot at the wrong time,” it was a PR disaster, widely interpreted as insensitive to the victim. Oats issued a mea culpa soon after, but that wasn’t the last what-were-they-thinking moment.
In Miller’s first game after the revelation of his involvement, he scored 41 points at South Carolina while some fans chanted “lock him up.” Before a home game later that week, Miller participated in a pregame introduction that was, at best, terrible optics: a teammate pretending to pat him down like Miller was clearing security. Oats said after that game he wasn’t aware of the routine, which had been going on all season, but that it was inappropriate and would not happen again. Those flubs, though, made it easy to view Alabama priorizing basketball success over the tragic loss of life.
“What I said at the first press conference, when it came out Brandon was there, I wish I would’ve chosen my words better. ‘Wrong place, wrong time’ was obviously not the correct wording, because I feel like we’ve taken this very seriously the whole time,” Oats told The Athletic. “The first time I met with the team, it was hard, just because Darius was their teammate, so you knew they cared about him. But we knew, and I made the point: There’s one victim. It’s the woman and her family. That’s where our prayers need to be. We kept recognizing that. It’s just a really sad situation. There’s no positives from it. None. It was hard to manage the fact that someone associated with our program even possibly had anything to do with this young mother not being here. It was hard. It was a lot of emotions that moved through our team.”
But, given the firestorm that has followed, would he go back and suspend Miller for at least a game or two as soon as the school became aware he’d transported a gun to the scene of an alleged murder?
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“No,” Oats said. “Based on everything we know, Brandon didn’t break any laws, he didn’t violate any school policy and he’s a fully cooperating witness. Based on all that, we made the decision to let him keep playing.”
That was always going to be a controversial call, but Oats is passionate in his belief it was the right one. He also bristles at the idea that he is not compassionate toward the victim and her family, although he declined in Friday’s news conference to say whether he’s reached out to them (AL.com reported he had not). “What you ask is a private matter,” Oats said. “I’m not going to discuss it publicly with anybody.” That question came after one about resting his starters in a blowout victory. The ping-pong between trivial and tragic is as strange to navigate as one might imagine.
“You’ve got to manage that while still trying to be a coach,” Oats said. “You’ve got basketball being so far down the list from what’s really important — but you still have to coach basketball. There’s no manual for that.”
It’s a larger question of whether basketball coaches should be asked to shepherd their teams through something as serious and sensitive as this. Oats believes his background as a longtime high school coach in Detroit has actually served him well in this situation, even if he’s stumbled through many of the forward-facing moments.
“I had a kid live with me for two years whose father was shot and killed,” Oats said. “He had a gun pulled on him in an argument. So he was bouncing around from house to house. He was a player I had kicked off the team as a junior. He wasn’t even on the team. But he needed a place to stay, his girlfriend told me, and he moved in with me. So I have had to deal with gun violence. My background is a lot different than maybe what some other coaches (at this level) are. So dealing with that, and he’s not the only one, I’ve always tried to picture myself more as a father figure than just a coach to them. That helped me kind of deal with this.”
And the reality, Oats said, is that Alabama’s athletic director, university president and board of trustees were all involved with the decision not to suspend Miller or Bradley, “and everybody was comfortable.” That verbiage won’t sit well with everyone. The questions will continue throughout their postseason run. They’ll only get louder.
Teammates say they hope that Oats is right, that the longer they play, the more people learn about Miller and the Tide, they’ll see them differently.
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“Brandon is one of the best teammates I’ve ever played with,” freshman guard Rylan Griffen said. “Just an unbelievable human being. One of the best people I’ve ever met in my life. We talk. I lean on him. In my opinion, he’s the best player in the country and you wouldn’t know that just by talking to him. You wouldn’t know that at all. He cares about the team. He cares about everybody.”
At least this week in Nashville, which is home for Miller, “I knew I was going to be comfortable,” he said Friday while tucked into his locker stall, away from the podium but still sticking to the script any time he was asked about the murder case.
What is it like to be asked about this over and over? “Um, respectfully, I can’t really go on and say anything about that.” Does it weigh on him, though? “I’m really just leaning on my teammates here in this locker room.”
On Sunday afternoon, after averaging 20.3 points, 10.7 rebounds and 4.3 assists over three games to win tournament MVP, Miller watched the confetti rain down on the Bridgestone Arena court. He danced with his teammates, snipped a piece of the net and felt a loud roar from the crowd. It’s a scene played out in dozens of gyms and arenas this month, part of the allure of March Madness for so many.
And yet as Miller did all of these things, he did so with a University of Alabama public relations official at his hip, just in case. A reminder that no matter what happens to Alabama this month, there’s more to the story.
“It’s never a moment,” Bradley said, “we’re not thinking about it.”
(Top photo: Andy Lyons / Getty Images)
