Why is Brandon Miller still playing?
Plus, what the hell happened to Edwin Díaz?
Dear readers,
Last week, Ian wrote about the political crises roiling some of the countries participating in the World Baseball Classic (including our own, of course). This week, some sports fans are turning on the WBC for a different reason — namely, a freak injury to the highest-paid closer in Major League Baseball, the New York Mets’ (and Puerto Rico’s) Edwin Díaz. On Wednesday, Díaz crumpled to the turf while celebrating Puerto Rico’s victory over the Dominican Republic, and it was later revealed that he tore the patellar tendon in his right knee. Díaz will likely be out for the entire season.
As you may know, one of the authors of this newsletter (Calder) is a diehard Mets fan, so the news of Díaz’s injury was a tough pill to swallow. But after some soul searching — and several hours of re-watching the cryptic footage of Díaz’s injury on loop a la the Zapruder film — we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s hard to blame the WBC for Díaz’s downfall. Participating in the WBC is a calculated risk for players hoping to suit up for the Major League season, and injuries are always a possibility. But these are adults that we’re talking about, and they have every right to represent their home turf on a global stage. Díaz injury was a freak accident — at the end of the day, we’ll just have to chalk it up to the curse that’s plagued Mets relievers for decades. (Spare some thoughts for those of us who lived through Duaner Sanchez’s taxi crash in late 2006). The WBC is still a great tournament.
On another note: Ian was absent from his Southpaw duties a couple of weeks ago because he was doing some stellar reporting for his new story on the Federalist Society and its schmooze-and-booze-filled National Student Symposium. We hope you give it a read.
And if all that isn’t enough, we’ve got a piece for you on the chaos that’s taken hold of men’s college basketball. Let’s get to it.
-Ian and Calder
Around this time last year, we wrote a story for the newsletter titled “March is For the Underdogs” about just how fun March Madness can be when the NCAA’s Davids manage to vanquish its Goliaths.
This year’s tournament, which kicked off earlier this week, has already featured its fair share of thrilling upsets (shoutout to FDU and its mascot, Ian the Devil) but the headlines still belong to the University of Alabama — one of the favorites on the men’s side this year — which is wrapped up in a story that gets more disgusting by the day.
Here are the facts: Back in January, a 23-year-old mother named Jamea Harris was killed in a gunfight in Birmingham, Alabama. The alleged shooter, Michael Lynn Davis, was on the scene of the fight with (now former) Alabama men’s basketball player Darius Miles. In the leadup to the fatal confrontation, Miles texted Brandon Miller, a star on the Alabama team and a likely top-five pick in the 2023 NBA Draft, to bring Davis’ gun. Miller and his lawyers claim that he was already on his way to the scene to pick up Miles, didn’t know a gun was in the car, and didn’t see Miles’ text. Also at the scene was Alabama freshman guard Jaden Bradley, and just this week, the New York Times reported that another freshman Alabama basketball player, Kai Spears, was there as well. A flurry of gunshots ensued, and Harris wound up dead.
The players’ exact roles in the events that led to Harris’s death aren’t entirely clear, but it certainly doesn’t look good for them. Miles and Davis have both been indicted on capital murder charges, and video footage shows Miller arriving at the scene only minutes before the shooting began. He is apparently a “cooperating witness” in the investigation, but it seems possible that he could face charges down the road.
How has Alabama responded? Not well. Instead of dealing with the situation head-on — and suspending all the players who were involved until the situation is sorted out — the team has settled into such an obviously flimsy defensive stance that even dumb conservative sports outlets like The Outkick are calling them out for it. Miller did not help his case in the days after the incident when he continued with a pregame ritual where his teammates “patted him down” for (fake) weapons. Alabama’s coach Nate Oats later described the pat down as a riff on a TSA security check meant to signal that Miller was “cleared for takeoff,” but even he had to admit that the optics of the ritual were piss poor.
The whole thing is a gigantic mess, and the further that Alabama advances in the tournament, the worse this whole thing is bound to get. In a tournament meant to highlight the joy and achievement of its players, the spotlight has instead been cast on a grotesque display of violence.
If you’re asking, “Where is the NCAA in all of this?” — well, it’s complicated. As friend-of-the-newsletter Will Leitch reported in New York Magazine this week, the 2021 Supreme Court case that allowed players to profit off of their name, image, and likeness also prompted the NCAA to effectively abdicate its role as a centralized “league” authority, leaving individual universities and teams to set (and enforce) their own policies. As a result, Leitch explains, “Alabama can decide that winning a first-ever national championship is more important than doing anything about a player who allegedly provided a gun that killed the mother of a 5-year-old boy. And no one has the power to change their mind.”
Now, we’re not sure we agree with Leitch’s suggestion the NCAA would be handling the situation any better than Alabama has. After all, the league doesn’t exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to enforcing disciplinary measures against star players.
But the situation does clarify the strange in-between state of college athletics today. The Supreme Court’s move to loosen the NCAA’s grip over college athletics has been a financial boon for (some) college athletes, who can now do things like sign endorsement deals and appear in paid advertisements. But it has also plunged college sports into a sort of regulatory limbo, in which the NCAA remains to de facto economic power in college sports, while all disciplinary power has been devolved to the schools themselves. As a result, the relationship between the producers of the league’s value (the players) and the benefactors of that value (NCAA officials) remains completely muddled.
Given this uncertainty, it’s tempting to conclude that the NIL decision was a bridge too far, but we think it’s the opposite: we need to go further, not go backward. The only way out is through — by recognizing that players are employees of the NCAA, plain and simple. If the league recognized players as its employees, disputes like this one could be settled like any other labor dispute, with the NCAA bound by employment law and the players backed by a union. As hundreds of years of labor history shows, that’s hardly a perfect situation, but it’s almost certainly better than the current state of affairs.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . a dispute about gender inequalities in powerlifting? “Is USA Powerlifting’s gender policy ‘separate but equal’? The feud rages on,” by Rick Maese in The Washington Post (March 14, 2023).
. . . a controversial political gadfly in the NBA? “Jaylen Brown on Basketball, Activism and Being Black in Boston,” by Sopan Deb in The New York Times (March 17, 2023).
. . . a dubious promise from FIFA’s head honcho? “FIFA President Presses for Equal Pay at World Cup,” by Tariq Panja in The New York Times (March 16, 2023).