Alabama fires its baseball coach mere hours before Vanderbilt plays them

Well, this weekend’s baseball series has officially gotten weird.

To get you up to speed, somebody gambling at the sportsbook inside Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati placed a large bet on LSU to beat Alabama on Friday night. Internet speculation abounded that someone had inside information that Alabama’s ace starter Luke Holman was about to get scratched from his scheduled start (he was) and somebody bet based on this information.

Now, the state of Ohio responded by suspending all betting on Alabama baseball based on a third-party monitor’s detection of “suspicious betting activity.” I’m just going to throw out there that you don’t go nuclear and suspend all action on a team based on somebody maybe getting a tip about a pitcher getting scratched; there was obviously more to it than that. And now, less than a week later and mere hours before Vanderbilt opens a three-game series in Tuscaloosa, Alabama’s baseball coach is out of a job.

Of course nobody is saying anything, but there is a certain “this is exactly what it looks like” element to a coach getting fired days after an integrity watchdog flagged “suspicious betting activity” on a game involving a team, at a time that’s pretty damn inconvenient for the team in question (like, they couldn’t have just waited until the end of the season to do it), and accompanied by a statement from the athletic director that he’s being terminated for “among other things, violating the standards, duties, and responsibilities expected of University employees.”

UPDATE: Yeah, that’ll get you fired.