There went coach Nate Oats again Monday, sliding down the pole at the station one more time, rushing off to put out the latest fire within his Alabama men’s basketball program.
Sometimes Oats is the firefighter; sometimes he’s the arsonist. Either way, there has been a constant need over the past three months to keep an extinguisher handy. The sirens keep blaring at Bama.
The latest brushfire occurred when the Tuscaloosa Patch reported Monday that Wichita State transfer Jaykwon Walton, who had committed in March to Alabama for the 2023–24 season, was arrested Saturday night near The Strip, the nightlife district just west of the school’s campus. Walton and another man, Kameron Deshawn Harris, were busted on misdemeanor marijuana possession charges after police approached the car in which they were passengers. In addition to the marijuana, police found three loaded guns in the car.
In Alabama, the weed is the crime and the loaded guns are not—decide for yourselves which carries a greater threat to society. Concealed carry of a handgun without a pistol permit became legal in Alabama on Jan. 1, according to the Patch story, so Walton was legally in the clear on the weapons front. From an Alabama basketball perspective, not so much.
“Alabama is no longer recruiting Jaykwon Walton and he will not be a student-athlete at The University of Alabama,” Oats announced via a school statement roughly an hour after the Patch story on Walton’s arrest was published. It was another reactive moment from the Tide.
Charlie Riedel/AP
Framing it as an ongoing recruitment was another in a series of “well, actually” moments for Oats. Walton had committed in late March, so the recruitment was over. He wasn’t in Tuscaloosa last weekend because he was still kicking the tires on the program.
But the 21-year-old Walton figured that was an opportune time for an Alabama basketball recruit to possess some weed and a gun just a couple of blocks from the very spot where a deadly shootout engulfed the Crimson Tide program in mid-January.
Tuscaloosa has become the Bad Judgment Capitol of College Basketball.
On Jan. 15, then Alabama basketball player Darius Miles was charged with capital murder for his role in a shootout that killed 23-year-old Jamea Jonae Harris. Miles’s gun was used in the shooting. He handed it to his childhood friend from Maryland, Michael Davis, who then fired bullets into the car in which Harris was a passenger.
Miles procured the gun from the back seat of teammate Brandon Miller’s car, where he had left it before entering a bar earlier that night. Miles had texted Miller—who would become the Southeastern Conference Player of the Year and Freshman of the Year—that he needed the gun after a verbal altercation outside a bar. Miller drove up, Miles got the gun and the shootout ensued.
Miles was dismissed quickly from the team and school, but the presence of Alabama’s star player and teammate Jaden Bradley at the scene didn’t surface publicly until a pretrial hearing in late February. That created an immediate firestorm, and Oats poured kerosene on it that day by blowing off Miller’s tangential role in a killing as simply a matter of “wrong spot at the wrong time.” The coach attempted to douse the blowback from his words with an apology (“well, actually”), but that was a tough one to walk back.
The school later insisted it had little information at all about Miller’s and Bradley’s presence that night, other than the fact that they were not charged with a crime and were cooperating witnesses. Alabama’s decision to go forward with both players in the starting lineup, instead of withholding them from competition as the investigation continued, was a damn-the-torpedoes commitment to winning above all else. And the way the school handled it became a test case for surviving self-immolation.
At the end of the week in which the Miller connection came to light, Alabama played a home game against Arkansas. In pregame introductions, Miller was patted down by a walk-on in a feigned weapons search. This was an astonishing display of ignorance, one Oats tried to explain (“well, actually”) as a pantomime of an airport security check—which, hey, those are checks for weapons there, too. Oats added that the patdown routine, which apparently had been going on all season, would immediately be discontinued.
Having established itself as the likely overall No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament and the most controversial team in the sport, March became an awkward dance for the Crimson Tide. There were questions about team and school gun policies. There were vague, rehearsed answers from Miller and teammates. When the season screeched to a halt in a Sweet 16 upset against San Diego State, Alabama was left with little to show for its mortgaged reputation.
Since then, the program exodus has been significant. Guards Bradley and Nimari Burnett entered the transfer portal. Miller entered the NBA draft and is expected to be a high pick. Fellow freshman Noah Clowney also put his name into the draft and is expected to stay there. Three other players are also weighing pro options—big man Charles Bediako and guards Jahvon Quinerly and Mark Sears—and their decisions will largely shape the outlook for 2023–24.
Into that void come four freshmen (a good class, but not overwhelming) and a few transfers. Walton was supposed to be a valued addition, a tall guard who can shoot. He bounced around from Georgia to juco to Wichita, leading the Shockers in scoring last season at 13.9 points per game.
But he turned out to be the one thing Alabama couldn’t afford right now: a player facing a drug charge who had a loaded gun in his possession on another Saturday night near The Strip. You can give Oats credit for moving swiftly here, but let’s be honest: What choice did he have? This was an automatic disassociation.
Whatever due diligence the Crimson Tide did around Walton, the decision to recruit him ended ignominiously. Fireman Nate needs some relative choir boys on his roster and calm times around the program, not more flammable situations to extinguish.
