Charles Bediako has officially been ruled ineligible by the NCAA, and after playing five games in his return to Alabama on a temporary restraining order, his collegiate basketball career is over. Many of Nate Oats’s counterparts across the SEC raced to back the NCAA’s efforts to have Bediako ruled ineligible, but Ole Miss head coach Chris Beard handled the situation in a much different way.
On Wednesday night, when Alabama beat Ole Miss 93-74 in Oxford, Beard had written a note for Bediako and rather than addressing the situation from the legal or competitive angle, approached it from the human perspective.
According to Oats’s postgame press conference, Beard arranged for the cheering section to refrain from any taunts of Bediako, whom Oats left behind in Tuscaloosa to avoid that exact situation, and Beard wrote a note for Oats to deliver to his embattled, now-former player.
Nate Oats began his postgame press conference by thanking Chris Beard for writing a note to deliver to Charles Bediako:
— The Next Round (@NextRoundLive) February 12, 2026
"One of the classiest moves I've ever seen... I thought it was an extremely well-written, thoughtful thing for an opposing coach to do." pic.twitter.com/8QRTwBFh0I
Chris Beard was all class ahead of Alabama’s Wednesday night showdown with Ole Miss
Potentially lost in all the arguments about whether or not he should be allowed to play has been the fact that Bediako is still a person whose basketball career and peak years of earning potential are in jeopardy. Whichever side of the argument you fall on, it’s not hard to sympathize with how difficult the situation must be.
Oats called Beard’s letter “one of the classiest moves I’ve ever seen,” and “an extremely well-written, thoughtful thing for an opposing coach to do.”
Oats also used the moment as an opportunity to remind everyone of Bediako’s humanity, which has unfortunately been forgotten throughout the entire ordeal.
“Some of the opposing coaches understand that we are dealing with a human, a young man that obviously is disappointed. The system is broken as we know it, and he’s a victim of a broken system, but he’s still a human and a young man,” Oats said as he opened his press conference.
Sure, “a victim of a broken system” is Oats laying it on a bit thick in this regard, but it was a classy move by Beard to recognize the difficulty of an opposing athlete and of Oats to call attention to it. Beard has had his own share of hardships throughout his career, many of them self-inflicted, but either way, he’s certainly somebody who could share a word of wisdom about overcoming very public adversity.