An awful week for college basketball

The robust interest in college basketball I once nurtured has long since curdled for reasons not terribly complicated, reasons directly related to the sport’s unseemly underbelly of long-running scandal.

Just about everything about the build-up to March Badness escapes my notice these days, so when Alabama announced on the afternoon of Jan. 14, a Saturday, that freshman forward Darius Miles would miss the remainder of the season with a knee injury, it should have been a far-off factoid falling in a forest of indifference.

Instead, it was the impetus for what last week became the biggest sports story around, because that news apparently sent a despondent Miles clubbing that night in The Strip, a stretch of Tuscaloosa bars and restaurants near the university’s campus. It was from there he sent a text to teammate Brandon Miller, instructing Miller to drive to The Strip and to bring Miles’ gun.

That’s according to police testimony.

Very soon thereafter, the gun made it into the hands of Miles’ friend Michael Davis, and very soon after that, Davis used it to escalate a verbal confrontation that ended with Miles and Davis being held for capital murder in the shooting death of Jamea Harris.

Harris, 23, was in a car with her boyfriend, Cedric Johnson, who returned fire, because of course he did. This is America after all, a place with a psychotic gun culture where blasting away at each other on a Saturday night can barely even make the news anymore. As of Jan. 1, you no longer even need a permit in Alabama to carry a concealed weapon, but there’s nothing notably Bama-centric about this story, some version of which happens in 1,000 other American places with horrifying regularity.

What is notable is that while Alabama kicked Miles off the team, Miller remains a member in very good standing six weeks after allegedly delivering a murder weapon, but, more pressingly I guess, two weeks from Selection Sunday.

In a news conference after Miles and Davis were denied bond this week, Alabama Coach Nate Oats almost literally shrugged off Miller’s role that terrible night, calling it one of those wrong-place-wrong-time deals and lamenting that he “can’t control what anybody does outside of practice,” and that “college kids are out. Nobody knew that was going to happen.”

Those remarks landed as so obtuse and offensive that Oats later issued an apology, but no one, most particularly the family of Harris, who left a 5-year-old son, can possibly unhear them.

What they hear instead is, “Hey, we’ve got a shot at the Final Four here!”

On Wednesday night on ESPN2, there was boundless visual evidence as to why Alabama is loath to remove Miller from the college basketball landscape near the start of March. Alabama played at South Carolina, where the crowd chanted “Lock him up!” at the 6-9 forward who was taking over the game.

Second-ranked Alabama, which has never been to the Final Four, has everything necessary to win it all. They’re huge, swift, resourceful, dogged, and when things get uncomfortable, they throw it to Miller, whom analyst and former coach Seth Greenberg compared to Kevin Durant. And to George Gervin. Across a canvas of thunderdunks, finger rolls, and majestic three-pointers that seemed to scrape the ceiling, Miller hit a career-high 41 points, more than half Alabama’s output. He tied the game at the buzzer and won it in the last second of overtime with a soaring left-handed layup over helpless Gamecocks defender GG Jackson, himself an ostensible lottery pick.

“It could have been a distraction,” Oats gushed afterword, “but Brandon showed up.”

The man can’t help himself. There’d have been no distraction, coach, if Brandon hadn’t showed up with a gun in the small hours of January 15. Miller’s attorneys this week said their client delivered the alleged murder weapon unwittingly. Miles, they said, placed it in Miller’s car beneath some clothing in the back seat, and that Miller was on his way to Miles anyway before getting the text.

But it seems there are at least two more responsible reactions, even for a 20-year-old, when you get a text that says bring the gun. “What gun?” might be one. “Naw bro, see you later,” might be another.

Instead Miller drove on. Harris wound up dead. The Tide rolled on. Oats, according to Pat Forde of Sports Illustrated, even called former NFL linebacker Ray Lewis, perhaps for advice about negotiating an inconvenient murder.

It’s important to emphasize here that Miller has not been charged, and that the Tuscaloosa district attorney said the reason for that is “there’s nothing we could charge him with.”

On that legal footing then, the best part of the college basketball season lurches onward, but now and for a very long time, no televangelic buzzer-beating March Madness Cinderella can ever scrub this game clean.