The endorsement at least some people have been waiting for in the race for Alabama's U.S. Senate seat has arrived, with NBA great and former Auburn basketball player Charles Barkley telling NBC News, "if I lived here, I'd vote for Doug Jones."

Barkley -- asked to weigh in on politics while in Auburn for the unveiling of a statue of him outside Auburn's basketball arena on the day of the annual Iron Bowl clash with Alabama in football -- told NBC's Vaughan Hillyard that Republican nominee Roy Moore should have been "disqualified" from the race long before recent allegations surfaced that he sexually assaulted teenage girls and behaved inappropriately around others in the 1970s.

"Everybody's going crazy over these sexual allegations, Roy Moore to me, when he brought in Steve Bannon should have been disqualified," Barkley said. "I don't understand. How can you have a guy who's running with a white separatist running for a political office?

"We've got a lot of black people in this state who are amazing people but to run a campaign with a guy as your chief advocate who is a white nationalist or white separatist, that should have disqualified Roy Moore way before this women stuff came up."