You might be perplexed as to how a big-time athletic department such as Alabama's could end up in crisis mode this week over something so absurd.
Should Alabama really have stood in the way of women's basketball player Daisha Simmons potentially being allowed to play this season at a school closer to home, where her brother has a serious illness?
Duh, right?
So how could the Crimson Tide's top athletic department officials, AD Bill Battle and deputy AD Shane Lyons, and women's basketball coach Kristy Curry all find themselves in a position to be portrayed as ogres worthy of inclusion in some future version of "American Horror Story"?
Chalk it up to the pitfalls of the college sports bureaucracy, a seeming lack of awareness of the power of the Twitterverse and other forms of media, and an insistence to stand on principle while falling down on common sense. Alabama finally dialed into the "sanity" frequency Tuesday and announced it would support a waiver to allow Simmons to compete this season at Seton Hall. The NCAA still has to rule on whether it will allow that, but getting the waiver from Simmons' former school, Alabama, was considered crucial.
Could the Crimson Tide have avoided the past week-plus of negative publicity from a situation in which they were bound to lose in the court of public opinion? Sure, by simply supporting the waiver back in August. But Alabama didn't do that and then displayed complete tone-deafness when several newspapers and websites, a Twitter campaign and a Keith Olbermann slap-down called for the Crimson Tide to come to their senses.
"We consider the matter closed," Alabama initially said, coming off like a cold, bloodless monolith. Are Battle and Curry the "worst sportspersons in the world," as they were pronounced on Olbermann's show last week? Of course not. I've covered Curry during her coaching career since she took over at Purdue in 1999. Through her years with the Boilermakers, then Texas Tech, and now Alabama, Curry has had her ups and downs, like most coaches, and faced some understandable criticism. However, some of the things written and said about her recently have been ridiculous and unfair.
Still, for Curry, who is in her second season of trying to rebuild Alabama women's hoops, this avoidable controversy has created a stain. I talked with Simmons, her mother, Seton Hall coach Tony Bozzella, Curry, and other Alabama officials this week. I got a sense of how this dispute had mushroomed beyond what any of the parties wanted.
Simmons, a guard from Jersey City, N.J., had played two years at Alabama after transferring from Rutgers. Curry came to the program in 2013 and, to be frank, has done some of the housecleaning that happens in most Division I sports when new coaches take over losing programs. The Tide's last NCAA tournament appearance was in 1999. So Curry wanted to institute a new culture, which usually means some players will be sent packing.
But Alabama definitely wanted to keep Simmons, a starter the last two seasons. Initially, in March, she said she would return for her final year of eligibility. But a lot was going on with her: She wanted to be in an MBA program and didn't get accepted into Alabama's program. She'd gone home and seen health declines for her mother, who works two jobs, and her older brother, who has kidney disease. Seton Hall said it would admit her into its MBA program. So in May, she told Curry she wanted to transfer, and then Simmons met with Lyons.
Both Curry and Lyons pressed Simmons for definitive reasons why she had changed her mind about staying. Simmons acknowledged to me that she was reticent to divulge details about her family's situation, considering it private. She's a young person who may not have been able to articulate everything she felt about wanting to transfer.
Alabama denied her scholarship release, but eventually relented, and she went to Seton Hall. It was a contentious process, though, that continued when Seton Hall sought a waiver so Simmons could play this school year, which she also thinks is the best thing for her family. She needed that waiver from Alabama, as per NCAA rules, since she had transferred twice in her career.
Battle wrote a letter to the NCAA saying Alabama didn't support the waiver, citing the fact that Simmons had made her decision so late that it put the program in a bad position. In that letter, though, he didn't mention a lack of information about Simmons' family members' health as a reason for not supporting the waiver. That assertion came Tuesday, in a press release from Battle.
However, Seton Hall actually had sent Alabama and the NCAA detailed documents in August confirming the seriousness of Simmons' brother's illness. Alabama either didn't pay attention then, or decided this week to rewrite the narrative about its waiver decision.
If this all seems like red-tape hell, it is. This dispute can be added to the stack of examples related to the issue of student-athletes' rights in the college "indentured servant" paradigm.
Alabama officials were upset such a big deal was being made of the waiver. After all, they said, they had given Simmons her release (after a fight) and it was up to the NCAA to decide whether she would get to play this year or be forced to wait another year (which would have been her sixth in college).
But a bigger question is, once Simmons was gone to Seton Hall, why didn't Alabama just support the waiver? What did they care if she played this year or next? Why continue any possibility of acrimony?
Instead, they held fast to a decision that to most outsiders seemed petty, and it ended up being a giant mud ball splattering the athletic department. Will other schools learn from this and the similar bad publicity Kansas State got in the spring for trying to deny women's basketball player Leticia Romero her release to transfer?
We can hope. Maybe they will see that while it's understandable to want to protect their interests, they're really doing just the opposite by getting into protracted disputes with college kids who just want to move on.