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Tuscaloosa County Circuit Judge Jim Roberts created anarchy in college basketball this week when he ruled former G League and two-way player Charles Bediako immediately eligible to play for Alabama.
Roberts is also quite familiar with Crimson Tide athletics.
The judge and his wife Mary Turner Roberts are listed as active athletic donors on The Crimson Tide Foundation’s website, with lifetime contributions between $100,000 and $249,000.
Alabama and the NCAA both did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bediako is expected to play in Alabama’s game against Tennessee on Saturday. He played for the Crimson Tide from 2021 to 2023 and is suing the NCAA to seek reinstatement of his remaining eligibility despite leaving Alabama and declaring for the NBA draft in 2023. Bediako, a 7-foot center, never played in the NBA but signed a two-way contract with the Spurs in 2023. He played in the G League as recently as last Saturday, January 17.
The 23-year-old’s lawsuit is exactly the one G League executives feared when some of the league’s alumni started to commit to colleges last year.
“It’s challenging the definition of an NBA contract,” a G League executive in the Eastern Conference told FOS in November. “If you declared for the draft, went undrafted and signed directly with a G League team, is that not considered an NBA contract to the right judge the same way a standard deal or [training camp deal] is?”
Roberts appears to be that judge, and his backing of Crimson Tide sports isn’t his family’s only conflict of interest. His wife is a lawyer on the defense team for Bediako’s former Alabama teammate Darius Miles, who is set to stand trial for capital murder in a 2023 shooting.
Miles’s trial is currently delayed because his defense team has accused the judge of being biased against the defense and is seeking to have the judge recused.
A call to Jim Roberts’s office by Front Office Sports on Friday was not immediately returned.
While NCAA eligibility lawsuits are occurring almost daily, judges have still recused themselves from cases when they see a possible conflict of interest that could impair their judgement. North Carolina judge Michael O’Foghludha removed himself from Duke’s lawsuit against quarterback Darian Mensah over an NIL deal because he is a Duke men’s basketball season ticket holder and married to a university employee.
Prolific college sports lawyer Darren Heitner is representing both Mensah and Bediako. Heitner did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Alabama basketball coach Nate Oats defended the move to media on Friday afternoon.
“So first of all, the system’s clearly broken,” Oats said Friday. “I’m all for figuring out a way to fix it. But since the NCAA has already allowed professionals to play and virtually every team we’ve played this year or will play has a former professional player on the roster, you tell me how I’m supposed to tell Charles and the team that we’re not going to support them when he’s been deemed legally eligible to play…. Charles shouldn’t be punished for choosing to go the academic route out of high school, rather than the professional route like the international players did”
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