Alabama basketball coach Nate Oats was once a high school math teacher, so hopefully he will understand this perspective.

A family member of Jamea Harris sent me a text message on Saturday morning that was 922 words long. That is how pain appears on a page in numbered form. I didn’t know what to say. It hurt me to read it. I was walking my dog at Ruffner Mountain at the time, trying to clear my head before somehow covering basketball later in the day, wondering if it would ever stop raining.

“Thank you for listening,” were the final words before, “sorry about the long text.”

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There were times when I wrote for print newspapers that editors would have possibly fired me for sending in a 922-word report about something I covered. This text message was 922 words long. The newspapers are gone — today was the final run in Birmingham, Huntsville and Mobile — but the listening and the feeling and the reporting of hard truths remain.

We will always listen. We will always feel. We will never shy away from the telling of hard truths.

Imagine the pain of the Harris’ family knowing that Alabama basketball player Brandon Miller went through a pregame routine on Saturday that included being frisked down by a teammate. How do you think that made them feel? Miller is the player who delivered a gun to the scene where Harris was shot through the face while sitting in a car. And in his first home game since being named in a police testimony, Miller was frisked down by a teammate after being introduced as a starting player for a basketball game.

Like it was some kind of casual thing done without thinking. No feelings. No listening. Only blindness inside Coleman Coliseum and blinding rage without.

And the cheers of fans for Miller during his introduction were deafening.

Alabama’s coach was a high school math teacher once, so maybe he will understand this perspective. That win against Arkansas felt like a net loss for decency. Such is the calculus of shame.

Alabama won a game 86-83, but continues to lose respect outside of its darkening bubble. After the courtroom revelation of Miller’s involvement in Harris’ death, the words Alabama basketball have mutated into the triggers of revulsion for many around the country and the world.

Alabama basketball now represents the corruption of values, the mismanagement of higher education and the stripping away of senses that make us human. Miller transported a gun to a shooting and he didn’t even sit one single game. Instead, he somehow didn’t think to discontinue the pregame ritual of a teammate patting him down for a weapon.

There will be more games. Alabama plays Auburn on Wednesday in Tuscaloosa and then Texas A&M on the road in the final game of the regular season. After that, it’s on to Nashville for the SEC basketball tournament. After the Arkansas game, something else distasteful occurred with the handling of this awful situation. Alabama’s public relations flack instructed reporters to only ask questions about basketball.

Want to look guilty of something? Tell the reporters to stop asking questions. I can promise Alabama that the questions are only beginning.

Oats, to his credit, said after the game that Miller has been told to cut pat downs out of the act during the player introductions. Alabama’s coach said he wasn’t aware of the routine. Why is Miller even playing at all? It’s a good question. Alabama basketball is the biggest villain in college sports today because of the decision to play Miller. If suspending Miller would have been an admission of guilt by Alabama, then making him stop his pregame pat downs is evidence of a guilty conscience.

Miller, of course, shouldn’t even be playing in games at all, but I’m beginning to wonder at this point if his presence on the team after the shooting death of Harris was even Oats’ call to make. It’s unclear after Alabama’s athletics director made murky the decision-making process.

Whose decision was it to play Miller and Jaden Bradley, really? It’s an important bit of accounting that Byrne made unclear when he participated in a podcast with ESPN’s Rece Davis. He told Davis it was a group decision that included the president of the university. Classic conflict management and blame shifting. No one made the call. We all made the call. Who really knows?

All we really know is that the attorneys are working overtime. Lost on many is the understanding that an attorney does not determine right or wrong. It is the craft of attorneys to make something appear right or wrong.

Was it the coaches call to play Miller after delivering a gun or was that decision on Byrne? Was it President Stuart Bell’s call to play Miller after Tuesday’s police testimony and the introduction of new information in the case? According to police, former Alabama basketball player Darius Miles sent a text to Miller requesting a gun. The gun apparently belonged to Miles and it was then used by Miles’ friend, Michael Davis, to shoot into the car where Harris was killed.

Was that call to play Miller on the president of a university? These are the questions when accountability is traded for plausible deniability.

Miles and Davis are facing charges of capital murder. Miller is playing games after Oats initially said that his star player did nothing wrong.

For Alabama basketball, for the entire university, every win continues to make the school look worse. Fans cheering wildly during player introductions that included a pat down of Miller? All of this could have been avoided. The cognitive dissonance is incalculable. The pain can be measured in words.

Joseph Goodman is the lead sports columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of “We Want Bama: A season of hope and the making of Nick Saban’s ‘ultimate team’”. You can find him on Twitter @JoeGoodmanJr.