One day after the University of Miami publicly announced that second-year freshman safety Avantae Williams had been reinstated to the team after his legal situation had been rectified, UM coach Manny Diaz said Williams won’t be allowed to play in the Hurricanes’ first six games.
Williams, listed as 6-0 and 198-pounds on UM’s roster, is from DeLand.
He did not participate in any of fall camp.
“In terms of the Avantae situation, obviously the situation changed with the way the case was handled,’’ Diaz said Monday during a Zoom news conference. “Those decisions are certainly not made by one individual. There’s a lot of communication with the administration at the university level, the administration at the athletics department level.
“Really, what became our focus is, ‘What can we best do for Avantae moving forward?’ And that’s really what we’ve put in a plan about. You mentioned the benchmarks — there are a lot of things. We want this to be educational, to be able to affect Avantae down the road, more so than anything we can teach on a football field, so some of the things [will include] mentorship, educational opportunities, the groups that he’s going to participate in and he’s got to meet those benchmarks to get back up to play.
“Avantae won’t play for us for the first six games of the season and, to be quite honest, Avantae hasn’t practiced or run, or done anything physically. He’s just going to work with our strength-and-conditioning staff for the next two weeks. It’d be unfair to dump him right in the middle of practice. The guy did miss a training camp. You have to take that into account, but our role is to make the best Avantae Williams we possibly can and that’s why, again, we gave him the avenue back. There are some things that we want him to be able to accomplish that we think will help him and, again, by helping him, that ultimately helps us as a football program.”
Willliams, 20, was rated the nation’s No. 1 safety by Rivals.com in the 2020 recruiting class.
Police had originally charged Williams on July 21 with three counts of aggravated battery on a pregnant woman, which is a felony. But Miami-Dade prosecutors closed the case after the woman, his former girlfriend who was 31 weeks pregnant during the incident, said she wouldn’t press charges.
When asked why UM had originally dismissed Williams after the arrest, Diaz said this:
“I just think that there are university policies and the way things are laid out and the initial information that came in — I would say, you make the best decision at the time given the information you have at the time you have to make it.
“Talking to the leaders at the university, if we had a chance to go through the whole thing again, I think we would’ve done the exact same thing again because, at the end of the day, we’re still back at where we are now. Whether it’s suspension or dismissal, now we’re focusing on semantics. Given the information we had initially, we felt we made the proper decision. Given the change in information, we felt we had the chance to update what we thought about that situation and explore an avenue moving forward.”
The final Miami-Dade memo on the case said, “The victim stated that she is not a victim and does not feel the defendant will harm her or her unborn child. The victim advised she was in ‘emotional distress’ when she spoke to police, and that the police were trying to make the situation more than what it was.”
She claimed the bruises and injuries were “from when she moved into her apartment, and not from the defendant battering her,’’ the memo said. The state declined to file charges because there were no independent witnesses and Williams “made no admissions to law enforcement.’’
On Sunday, UM put out a statement saying, ”Despite the charges being dropped, we take all allegations of domestic violence very seriously. Therefore, the student-athlete will need to reach specific benchmarks in the area of education, mentorship, and personal development in order to return to competition and remain as a member of the football team.’’
