Alabama's Brandon Miller, Ole Miss' Chris Beard symbolize SEC's tarnished image

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — The best player on the top-seeded team in the NCAA Tournament took his seat at the podium Wednesday, ready for whatever questions might come.

To his right, monitoring the makeshift interview room inside Legacy Arena was a man in dark slacks and red polo shirt that said “Alabama Basketball” above his chest. On his belt line, a badge and a handgun were visible for all to see.

It’s unclear whether Brandon Miller is the first college basketball player who was escorted by security at every step on what is generally a light, easy day before the first round of March Madness. But it was certainly a striking way to illustrate the heaviness and unease around a player whose proximity to a murder of a 23-year-old woman in January — and his role in transporting the weapon used to kill her — has made him and the University of Alabama the subject of significant controversy.

“I feel like we always travel with security,” Miller said. “That’s all I'm going to say on that.”

Whether a bodyguard is warranted to protect Miller — Alabama coach Nate Oats said it was “appropriate” in light of threats he has received online — this entire strange scene is the result of a choice made by the school as soon as it learned that Miller and two other basketball players were at the scene on the night bullets flew in downtown Tuscaloosa.

As long as there were no criminal charges against Miller, the school could keep playing him. And as long as he was on the court, Alabama had a chance to win a national championship.

In a business where they constantly sell the fiction of molding men and building character, Alabama decided it didn’t need to know anything more about Miller’s actions that night than whether or not the district attorney could charge him with a crime.

Whatever the lowest possible bar is for representing a highly respected university, Alabama slid under it like a contortionist trying to set a world record in the limbo. Miller hasn’t missed a game and will be on the floor Thursday when the Crimson Tide begins its NCAA Tournament run against Texas A&M-Corpus Christi.

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Alabama, however, isn’t even a one-off in its own conference these days.

On Tuesday afternoon in Oxford, Mississippi, a chronically mediocre basketball program introduced Chris Beard as its new coach and attempted to explain it with the same “we did our due diligence” nonsense that we’ve heard hundreds of times when universities or professional sports organizations make problematic hires.

Of course, there’s little chance Ole Miss knows much more than the rest of us who read the police report in December when Beard, then the coach at Texas, was alleged by his fiancée to have choked her and caused other bruises and scrapes as well as a bite mark that were visible to police.

Beard was arrested, charged with felony domestic violence and fired by Texas, a decision the university made even though the team was highly ranked and, like Alabama, had a legitimate chance to win the national title.

Though the charges were dropped, largely because Beard’s fiancée, Randi Trew, did not want him prosecuted and changed her story from what she told police on the night of the incident, the notion that he could be hired to another power conference coaching job three months later was almost unfathomable across the industry.

Of course, it only takes one school with no shame or scruples to conclude that it can live with whatever happened as long as there were no charges. We should not be surprised that Mississippi, which has never won anything of significance in men's basketball, just happened to be that school.

As a result, we got to hear Beard prattle on Tuesday as if he were the aggrieved party in the whole situation.

“What I can tell you is, much of what was reported was not accurate,” Beard said, “and that’s been proven with the case not only being dismissed, charges dropped, but also, Randi’s statement on Dec. 23.”

You wonder how much cringing there was in the SEC office when that statement was made, and yet how quickly they got over it with visions of having another NCAA Tournament-quality program in the league almost instantly.

In the end, we now have a very clear picture of where the SEC is and what it stands for. Just avoid prosecution, baby.

That’s it. That’s all it takes in Greg Sankey’s SEC these days to carry the banner of college sports’ most successful conference. As long as you can add banners and dollars to the league’s bottom line, the rest will take care of itself.

Once upon a time, when Sankey’s old boss Mike Slive ran the league, there was at least a pretense of higher standards. Slive, who died in 2018, took over the SEC at a time when cheating was rampant and nine schools were either on probation or being investigated by the NCAA. Though it would be disingenuous to say the SEC was ever clean as a whistle, Slive took seriously the idea that the image of the conference needed to be cleaned up and worked diligently on reforms that halted the string of embarrassments.

And when there were slip-ups, Slive exerted his power and guided schools toward decisions that would help lessen the pain of NCAA punishment and ham-handed public relations.

If the last month is any indication, those days are over for the SEC. This is the era of anything goes. As long as it can help win a championship, that’s good enough to justify a whole lot of questionable behavior. Just deny, deflect and claim victimhood. Eventually, the controversy will blow over and the critics will move on to something else.

Maybe it’s not a bad strategy. If it can work for a presidential campaign — and we saw it in real time during the election of Donald Trump in 2016 — it can work to stay ahead of the Big Ten and the ACC.

And yet, the SEC keeps testing the limits of how low it can go.

It’s certainly possible that Miller has received threats, which are of course unacceptable, and that the school believes it should operate with caution in a highly public environment.

“It's nothing that a college kid should have to go through,” Oats said. “If you were able to see what I've seen then you would understand why that's going on right now.”

But when you hear Oats discuss it, you wonder if it ever occurred to him that the highly-charged environment around Miller is at least in part a result of the way Alabama has handled this. When the shooting happened, the school dismissed one player, Darius Miles, who was charged with capital murder for his role, but was not forthcoming about Miller’s presence.

Then, even when the entire world learned that he had the gun in his car and drove it to the scene after Miles requested it in a text message, it was essentially business as usual for Alabama basketball. No suspension. No investigation. Not much contrition. And certainly no pause just to figure out what the heck was going on.

The public face the school has presented is simple: Win, win, win.

Now that the tournament is here, Alabama has let Miller speak to the media, though he isn't saying much. He’s talked about the situation in vague terms as being heartbreaking. He talks about leaning on his teammates. It’s the same questions and the same answers over and over, and that’s certainly the plan for Alabama all the way to a national title.

Eventually, they’ll stop. For Miller and Beard, the worst is probably over. As long as they stick to the script, win games and continue to stay out of trouble, they’ve done their jobs for the SEC.

But it’s hard to see the glory in any of this when the first image of a potential championship run is an armed bodyguard at the door.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Alabama's Brandon Miller, Ole MIss' Chris Beard tarnish SEC's image