The sound of the 2023 NCAA Tournament: CLANK

more bricks than a LEGO convention

I put out a beacon call on the Twitter machine yesterday about the best article ideas before we hit the Sweet Sixteen/Elite Eight this weekend. I won’t have much time this weekend to do anything beyond daily previews/Tennessee-related content, but these three days off of the MBB bracket helps a lot with developing some deeper ideas. So: I put out a poll, and we’re exploring the top question that poll asked. Why is the NCAA Tournament so bad for three-point percentage (3PT%), and what can be done to fix it, if anything?

A small problem with writing this article is that I already wrote some form of it for the 2022 NCAA Tournament, because we had this same exact issue last March:

But that alone still wouldn’t explain what’s happened, starting in the Round of 32. Across the nine Tournaments directly preceding 2022, teams shot 1.1% better in the Round of 32 than they did in the Round of 64. This has a pretty simple explanation, to me: better teams are alive, and said teams are playing their second game in the arena of a weekend. You’re more familiar with your surroundings. That did not happen this year. In fact, it gave us the worst Round of 32 3PT% performance I can find on record.

We’ll explore deeper in this article after the paywall break (sorry), but the trends this year are similar. Teams aren’t posting the WOAT Round of 32 3PT% this year, but the shooting in general has been…well, bad.

• Round of 64 3PT%, 64 teams: 30.9%

• Round of 32 3PT%, 32 teams: 30.7%

That first figure is the worst since the 2013 Round of 64, while the Round of 32 figure is the second-worst I can find after 2022. What’s the problem here? After years of playing at unfamiliar venues with unfamiliar opponents, has anything meaningful changed?