There had been two axioms about Alabama basketball this season: the Tide did not need to shoot well to win, nor did it need Brandon Miller to score to win.

This was a team that earned the program’s second-ever No. 1 ranking in the Associated Press poll, and the school’s first-ever No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament, with balance. Defense picked up the offense, and other scorers picked up the slack when Miller did not have it.

Neither happened Friday night in Louisville.

Like it did with Maryland six days earlier, Alabama slugged it out with San Diego State for the game’s first 20 minutes before the Tide landed more punches early in the second half. The crimson contingent of a somewhat-underwhelming crowd in the KFC Yum! Center rose to its feet, and a feeling of inevitability fell over the building.

Alabama took a nine-point lead (48-39) with 11:40 left on the clock, and San Diego State called a timeout. By that point, Alabama was shooting 3-of-18 from three-point range, but it did not seem to matter. Miller had missed 12 out of his first 15 shots, but that did not seem to matter, either.

This was an Alabama team that, in the second round of the tournament, had beaten Maryland by 22 points despite shooting 39.7 percent from the field and 28.6 percent on three-pointers. According to OptaStats, that was the largest margin of victory in NCAA tournament history on shooting numbers that low.

Then in a span of three minutes, everything changed. The offensively-challenged Aztecs exited the timeout and made their next three three-pointers, flipping their nine-point hole into a three-point advantage. Miller had two turnovers during that span, then missed a three-pointer. San Diego State’s lead grew to nine points, Alabama was on the ropes and the game-saving plays from Miller never came. He had another turnover and three more missed triples to end the game.

In three NCAA tournament games, one of the country’s best players in the regular season shot 8-of-41, missing 16 out of the 19 three-pointers he attempted. He grabbed 11 rebounds, had three assists, a steal and a block against SDSU, but his six turnovers matched a season high.

According to ESPN, Miller’s 19.5 percent shooting rate was the worst since at least 1985 in the NCAA tournament for any player with at least 35 field-goal attempts.

Other than a seven-point burst from Mark Sears in 32 seconds that pulled Alabama within two points during the final minute, the supporting cast never bailed out Miller. Several times, Jahvon Quinerly drove to the rim and had his layup swatted away. Noah Clowney did not attempt a shot in the final 14 minutes. Rylan Griffen missed all four of his three-pointers in the final 12 minutes. Jaden Bradley and Nimari Burnett, who began the season as starters with high expectations, played five minutes and seven minutes, respectively. Bradley had two points, and Burnett had none.

As a team, Alabama shot 3-of-27 on three pointers, better than only their 3-of-28 showing in a season-opening win over Longwood.

Friday’s collapse was more than just a lapse from the tournament’s top overall seed. There were warning signs over the final quarter of the season that Alabama was no longer the juggernaut that smashed its way through the opening weeks of SEC play in January.

One unmistakable turning point was Feb. 21, when a court hearing for Darius Miles’ murder charge revealed the presence of Miller and Bradley at the scene of the Jan. 15 murder of Jamea Harris. Days earlier, Alabama made 47 percent of its three pointers (16-of-34) in a runaway win over Georgia, a reporters were once again scrolling through record books trying to keep up with a team that routinely challenged them.

To that point in the season — through its Feb. 18 win over Georgia — Alabama was shooting 36 percent on three pointers. Over its final 10 games, it shot 27.6 percent. And besides a 15-of-33 showing against an overmatched Texas A&M-Corpus Christi in the first round of NCAA tournament, Alabama shot 19.6 percent from beyond the arc in those other nine games.

Was it fatigue? Those was an issue Oats raised before the SEC tournament, but Alabama had extra rest before its conference tournament and before its Sweet 16 game against San Diego State. In each case, Alabama’s three-point shooting never took off quite the way it did earlier in the season.

Another possibility is the mental strain from the scrutiny on Miller and the program as a whole, which began with Miles’ arrest in mid-January but intensified after Miller’s name surfaced a month later. That was something Oats referenced during his pregame Crimson Tide Sports Network radio interview before Friday night’s loss.

“It’s a lot of big-picture things hanging around the team that are important, very important,” Oats said Friday afternoon. “Our reputation, image, all that is very important to us. But when it comes down to practice, video, games, scout, preparation — we need to be focused on the details, the task at hand. Be where your feet are. I think the guys have gotten back to that. Let’s focus on what we’re doing right now and be great at that. I think they’ve done a good job of that.”

Miller took over the first game after the Miles bond hearing by scoring a career-high 41 points in a narrow Feb. 22 win at South Carolina. But he shot 4-of-24 on three pointers over Alabama’s next three games, including 2-of-12 in a regular-season finale loss at Texas A&M, before returning to form to win SEC tournament MVP.

The freshman dealt with a groin injury that kept him less than 100 percent during the NCAA tournament, and center Charles Bediako had apparent leg issues that saw him head briefly to the locker room in the first round of the tournament and again Friday night. Injuries, though, seem like only a small piece of Alabama’s sudden exit in March.

This was a team that had different players step up at different points in the season, and too many faded down the stretch.

In perhaps the most impressive regular-season win for any college basketball team this season, Alabama beat Houston the road on Dec. 10. In that game, Noah Clowney scored 16 points on 7-of-12 shooting, including 2-of-6 from three-point range, while grabbing 11 rebounds. Another freshman, Jaden Bradley, scored 12 points in that environment and did not turn the ball over once.

Against Maryland and San Diego State, Clowney shot 2-of-11 and missed all six of his three-pointers. Bradley, who played double-digit minutes until late February, totaled 13 over the final two games, missing the only two shots he took.

Sears led Alabama with 16 points against San Diego State, mostly because of his late-game burst. He began the game 1-of-8, after shooting 10-of-43 (23 percent) since the regular-season finale.

Griffen, the lanky freshman guard, began earning national attention in late January when he shot 12-of-24 on three-pointers during a five-game span into February. But over the final 10 games of the season, Griffen shot 4-of-32 (13 percent) on triples. Over the same span, Burnett shot 5-of-22 on three pointers in limited minutes off the bench.

The only player whose arrow pointed up in March was Quinerly, but in what might have been his final game in an Alabama uniform, the fifth-year senior shot 4-of-13 for 10 points. He shot 1-of-3 on three pointers, 1-of-3 on free throws and had three turnovers along with three assists Friday night.

Analytically, Alabama will have one of the best teams in the country no matter what happens over the remainder of the tournament. It is ranked No. 4 in KenPom, with the third-ranked defense and 20th-ranked offense. But the meaning of some of the Tide’s biggest wins this season has become less clear.

North Carolina was the No. 1 team in the country when Alabama won a four-overtime thriller in November, but the Tar Heels missed the NCAA tournament. Michigan State was a top-12 team when Alabama beat them, but the Spartans finished well outside of the top-25. Houston was throttled Friday night by Miami in the Sweet 16. Alabama beat up SEC foes in Kentucky, Vanderbilt, LSU, Florida and Georgia, but that did not translate into long-range success.

Among teams in the final 15 of the NCAA’s NET rankings by the start of the tournament, Alabama went 1-4. Three of those teams — Gonzaga, UConn and San Diego State — are in the Elite Eight. The other, Tennessee, limped to a Sweet 16 loss to FAU without key starter Zakai Zeigler.

Alabama might have been dominant this season, but the Tide was not elite.

Mike Rodak is an Alabama beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @mikerodak.