Everything about this scene is weird. Miles is an 18-year-old amateur who just lost in humiliating, media-saturated fashion, and now he's got to face the music because, again, he feels like he has personally set this all in motion. Even a very neutral and almost compassionate telling of the events, like the one quoted above, can't help itself from assigning inevitability to the outcome, because it came after the quote. "To expect complete remorse…is unfair."Daxter Miles shouldn't be remorseful about anything. He wanted to win the game and said something that reflected this desire. It's easy and fun to joke on him for it—nearly everyone, myself and Kentucky players included has—but when it becomes an actual talking point instead of a funny "oh man, can you believe that??" tangent, then you've just created a narrative for the sake of a good story. A classic three-scene arc—issue, confrontation, resolution—out of thin air. This is where another example of the vernacular of sports fails everyone. Confidence is good, a necessity even, unless it's not. Confidence becomes foresight, and inspiration in victory and damning bulletin board material in defeat. This of course ignores the most important part, the whole reason anyone is writing anything about Daxter Miles, which is the 40 minutes of basketball played between West Virginia and Kentucky. No one thinks Kentucky won because Daxter Miles tweaked them. Not his teammates, or even his coach. A thoroughly humiliated Bob Huggins hit it right on the head after the game: "They just were way better than we were."Tucked around a corner, in the team's bathroom, Miles Jr. was waiting out the mob. When a media member approached one of his teammates for an interview in the small hallway leading to the bathroom, Miles Jr. then dipped into the handicap lavatory and closed the door behind him, his frizzy hair peeking above the tall stall. WVU assistant Erik Martin sauntered over and said a few quiet words to Miles Jr. His head deliberately shook at the freshman. After Martin stepped away, Miles Jr. came out of the bathroom a few seconds later, and when he sat down, he went full Marshawn Lynch.
"Kentucky played great," Miles Jr. said after being asked if he had any regrets over the faulty prediction. He repeated that phrase or some variation of it approximately 10-12 times over the next minute. He's just an 18-year-old kid, in his first NCAA Tournament, and to expect complete remorse or lucid pontification in the moments after the most humiliating loss of his young career is unfair.