If the first college basketball game you watched this season was Duke's 63-55 win at Boston College earlier this week, you might think the NCAA's decision to move the 3-point line back by 16.75 inches this season is having a disastrous impact on the game.
The Blue Devils and Eagles combined to miss the game's first 27 attempts from beyond the 3-point line, which is now the international distance of 22 feet, 1.75 inches.
But more than three months into the new season, teams continue to shoot as many 3-pointers as they did just two seasons ago when the shot's distance was more than a foot shorter.
So how has the shot affected the college game? Here are five takeaways.
1. 3-point percentages are down
There were just 12 teams that finished the 2018-19 season shooting below 30% from 3-point range. None of them were schools from major conferences.
Roughly two-thirds of the way through 2019-20 season, 33 teams are shooting below 30% from 3-point range, including Texas A&M, Georgia Tech, Pittsburgh, Boston College, North Carolina and reigning national champion Virginia. The Cavaliers have suffered a bigger drop off in 3-point percentage than any team in the country.
Here's a look at the teams with the biggest drop this season in shooting from last season of the 350 Division I teams:
| Team | 2018-19 | 2019-20 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 348. Oakland | 40.3 | 29.4 | -9.1 |
| 349. Grambling | 40.3 | 29.7 | -10.6 |
| 350. Virginia | 39.5 | 27.2 | -12.3 |
In total, teams are making a record-low 33.59% of their 3-pointers this season after making 34.54% last season. The record high came in 1987-88, the second season after the 3-point line was adopted by the NCAA, when teams hit 38.3% of their 3-pointers on just 10.4 attempts per game.
"It's had an impact on the game," TCU coach Jamie Dixon said. "Guys continue to shoot it. They're going to be spaced out. But it's a longer shot, and obviously a harder shot. And the percentages show that."
Some leagues are particularly struggling to adapt. After finishing 17th of the 32 conferences in 3-point shooting percentage at 34.7% last season, the Southeastern Conference is 30th this season at 31.51%.
Here's a look at the 3-point shooting in the major conferences:
| Conference | 2018-19 | 2019-20 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| AAC | 33.28% | 32.43% | -0.85 |
| ACC | 33.84% | 33.1% | -0.74 |
| Big East | 35.32% | 33.84% | -1.48 |
| Big Ten | 34.22% | 33.26% | -0.96 |
| Big 12 | 34.77% | 33.1% | -1.67 |
| Pac-12 | 34.73% | 34.32% | -0.41 |
| SEC | 34.72% | 31.51% | -3.21 |
"We're a really young league this year," South Carolina coach Frank Martin told CBS Sports. "You go through our league, our league is probably younger than any league in the country. With young players you unfortunately have those inconsistencies."
Martin's Gamecocks are shooting considerably fewer 3-pointers per game this season and making 31.1% of them after making 36.6% of them last season.
But some teams are taking and making more 3-pointers than ever.
2. Attempts are still high
Teams attempted 22.45 3-pointers per game last season and are attempting 21.84 per game this season, which is almost identical to the 2017-18 average of 21.85 attempts per game. Just seven seasons ago, teams attempted only 18.1 per game.
So while the NCAA Playing Rules Oversight Panel cited a desire to slow the trend of the 3-point shot "becoming too prevalent" in college basketball, the new line is not even close to bringing attempts per game back to the level of just a few seasons ago.
"I don't think it has affected our guys all that much," West Virginia coach Bob Huggins said. "If we go play in Madison Square Garden or some place where they have the NBA line, the first think my guys do is go run out there and stand behind the 3-point line and start chucking balls. I think if we put the line at half court, they'd be shooting behind half court."
The Mountaineers are, however, one of the power conference teams seeing a sharp drop-off in 3-point attempts this season. After attempting 23.67 of them per game a year ago, Huggins' squad is shooting just 17.9 per game this season.
Other teams and even entire conferences are trending up in 3-point attempts. Notre Dame, for example, is shooting 28.6 3-pointers per game and making 35% of them after shooting 26.1 per game and making 31.5% last season.
Fighting Irish coach Mike Brey said he had concerns over how the deeper shot would affect his traditionally 3-point-heavy team.
"But I never wanted to voice those to any of our players," Brey said. "I didn't want anybody thinking twice. If you're a guy that is a good 3-point shooter for us and that's a good shot for you at the old arc, we didn't want you turning them down all of a sudden or thinking twice. It's still a weapon for us, and we need to use it. I know the overall numbers are down probably a little bit nationally. But it's a key factor for us, even though it's further than last year. We need to make double-digit threes for the most part to win ACC games. So we're going to take them."
As a whole, the ACC is down slightly in 3-point attempts per game. But the Big 10, which is widely regarded as the best league in college basketball this season, is up to 22 attempts per game after averaging 21.5 last season when the line was shorter.
3. High quality, high volume shooters are less common
There were 49 Division-I players last season who played in at least 75% of their team's games and shot 40% or better from 3-point range last season with at least 2.5 makes per game. There were 66 in the 2017-18 season.
Through Tuesday's games, there were just 36 this season.
Of last season's crop of 49, only 20 are playing Division I basketball this season and just six were making more 3-pointers per game than they did last season. Those players are Justinian Jessup at Boise State, Terrell Gomez at Cal State-Northridge, Mitch Ballock at Creighton, Jordan Roland at Northeastern, Isaiah Joe at Arkansas and Markus Howard at Marquette.
Howard, who leads Division I in scoring at 27.9 points per game, is making 39.6% on 10.3 3-point attempts per game.
"Offensively, he's got deep range, and the further you guard him out, that gives him more space to operate off the dribble, and he's really good off the dribble," Villanova coach Jay Wright said.
Wright's assessment of Howard aligns with one of the goals of the rules committee, which sought to increase floor spacing and make the lane more accessible in its decision to move the 3-point line back.
4. Coaches unsure if spacing goal accomplished
A deeper 3-point line might make the floor more open for Howard, who controls the action for Marquette by drawing multiple defenders and hoisting deep 3-pointers.
But coaches around college basketball are hesitant to suggest the new 3-point line has succeeded in opening up the floor across the game.
"I really haven't noticed a difference in that regard," Wake Forest coach Danny Manning said.
In fact, if teams decide to play more zone to encourage opponents to attempt 3-pointers from the deeper line or choose to go under on ball screens because they feel the threat of an opponent pulling up from deep is diminished, it could have the opposite effect in some situations.
"I'm still trying to digest it," Brey said. "I think we all are trying to analyze from a defensive standpoint, do you do things different defensively to let guys shoot from deeper out because the law of averages maybe kicks in and it's not as good a shot over 40 minutes? You rotate in and out of that mentality at times. I still think it's a debate at every staff meeting as we're still crunching some numbers halfway through the year."
Like Brey, some of the game's other veteran coaches are still gathering data and figuring out how, or if, to adjust their schemes to the deeper 3-point line.
"It's getting close to being enough, but I took a statistics course in college, and you can't have a good test if you don't have great validity," North Carolina coach Roy Williams said. "And you have to have a lot of examples to have great validity. So still, in my mind, waiting to see."
Tennessee coach Rick Barnes voted for the new 3-point line as a member of the NCAA men's basketball rules committee. In regards to its impact, he said, "I don't think we'll know until the year is over with and we look at it and see the percentages."
5. Expect a bounce back
But Barnes, whose first year as a head coach came during the second season with the original 3-point line in 1987-88, has been around long enough to understand the trends that likely lie ahead with the new 3-point line.
"If it goes by what normally happens, it'll go down a little bit," Barnes said. "But it always comes back."
The percentage of points in college basketball scored on 3-pointers rose steadily every season from the introduction of the line until the 2008-09 season, when the line moved from 19 feet-9 inches to 20 feet-9 inches.
Then, everything dropped. Shooting percentage fell from 35.2% to 34.4%, attempts fell from 19.1 to 18.3 per game and 3-pointers accounted for just 27.39% of total points a season after accounting for a then-record 29.09%.
But by the 2015-16 season, teams were hoisting an average of 20.49 3-pointers per game, making 34.7% of them, and the shots accounted for 29.22% of total points, surpassing the old record set in the 2007-08 season.
It took players only a few seasons to adjust to a deeper line, and the prevalence of the shot only increased in the following three seasons until the new line's implementation for this season.
So even while 3-point shooting percentage hit historic lows and attempts per game dip slightly, there is an expectation that they will rise again and that the shot's prevalence will remain.
"We didn't move it back far enough, I don't think, to have much of an effect," Huggins said.
Here's how this season is compared to last season's for all Division I teams:
| Season | 3-point FG percentage |
3-point FG attempts per game |
|---|---|---|
| 2018-19 | 34.54% | 22.45 |
| 2019-20 | 33.59% | 21.83 |
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February 06, 2020 at 12:29PM
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College basketball's new 3-point line: Five ways moving the distance further out has impacted the game - CBS Sports
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