BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — The Alabama men’s basketball saga took a new turn Wednesday when star player Brandon Miller came to an NCAA tournament press conference accompanied by armed security. When asked about the unusual, perhaps unprecedented, security presence, coach Nate Oats alluded to Miller receiving threatening correspondence.
“If you guys saw some of what I’ve seen sent his way, I think you’d understand why that’s the case,” Oats said. “I don’t want to get into all that—the entire situation, as you know, is a heartbreaking situation on all accounts. But some of the messages from people that can sit behind fake email addresses—who knows if they’re real or not. … Our administration has seen stuff that I’ve seen, and [the security presence] is appropriate. It’s nothing that a college kid should have to go through.”
A man wearing a crimson Alabama basketball shirt, with a gun on his right hip and a badge on his belt, stood off-podium while Miller and teammate Mark Sears answered questions from the media. He also accompanied the Crimson Tide players through Legacy Arena to and from the interview room. When Alabama took the court for practice, he positioned himself at one end of the court. He was joined later in the practice by another armed man who was not wearing Alabama gear.
When Miller was asked about the security, he said, “I feel like we always travel with security.” However, that security presence was not seen last week at the Southeastern Conference tournament, and veteran NCAA tournament journalists could not recall seeing armed security in the interview room before.
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In January, Alabama basketball player Darius Miles and his friend, Michael Davis, were charged with capital murder after the killing of Jamea Jonae Harris, a 23-year-old mother who was sitting in a parked car as gunfire erupted in a busy bar district in Tuscaloosa. More than a month after those charges rocked college basketball, detective testimony at a pretrial hearing revealed Miller had delivered Miles’s gun in his car shortly before the shootout.
Police say Miles had texted Miller that he wanted his gun, which was in Miller’s back seat. It was unclear when Miller read the text, and Miller’s attorney has stated his client already was en route to pick up Miles when the text came in. The attorney said Miller did not know why Miles wanted his gun or that an altercation had happened.
The presence of Miller and teammate Jaden Bradley at the crime scene was a previously undisclosed bombshell that called into question whether the players should have been withheld from competition for some period of time as the investigation unfolded and more was learned. Alabama officials have said they stayed out of the fact-finding process and were not aware of the full context of Miller’s and Bradley’s presence at the scene until it came out in the hearing.
Despite that lack of a complete picture, neither player missed any playing time in what has been a historic Alabama season. Miller was named a first-team All-American and is considered a top-five NBA draft prospect.
The controversy over Miller’s status with the team has simmered ever since. Oats initially dismissed Miller’s presence at the crime scene as “wrong spot at the wrong time” and subsequently apologized for it. The negative attention spiked a few days later when Miller was introduced for an Alabama home game with a “patdown” routine from a teammate, as if being checked for a weapon. Alabama said that had been Miller’s standard pregame introduction during the season, and Oats said he was unaware of it. Regardless, the move garnered sharp criticism, and Oats said it would stop immediately.
Two putative Tide fans amplified the situation with tasteless T-shirts at the SEC tourney last week—Alabama-red shirts that said, “Killin’ our way through the SEC in ’23” on the backs of them. One of the two men told AL.com that he is indeed an Alabama fan and profanely told a reporter to leave him alone.
The Crimson Tide earned its first No. 1 NCAA tournament seed and with it the right to begin the event close to home here in Birmingham. But that comes with its own freighted context: Harris was from the city, and her family—including her 5-year-old son—lives here. Having the Tide in town as the celebrated local heroes keeps the family’s anguish fresh.
Alabama’s open practice was unremarkable, with about 200 fans offering applause. There were no audible boos at courtside from any other fans in attendance. But inevitably, the atmosphere around this Alabama team will continue to be charged, angry and potentially even dangerous if there is substance to the threats Miller has received. Expect to see armed security with the Crimson Tide for as long as they’re in this NCAA tournament.
