What basketball looks like for the least math-friendly team in the nation
Delaware State, welcome to the resistance
The three-pointer is experiencing some backlash. Not for the first time, of course. The three-pointer has experienced significant backlash ever since it first came into play.
In 1987, Sports Illustrated ran an article by the legendary Jack McCallum that showcased such luminaries as Mike Krzyzewski, Rollie Massimino, Gene Iba, and Denny Crum as hardcore haters of the game’s newest technology. In 2007, when the line got moved out from 19’9” to 20’9”, no less than Bruce Pearl was critical of the change, effectively saying it would make the game more boring. Even in summer 2019, when the NCAA made its most recent change to the three-point line, there were naysayers.
Any time a change is made anywhere, there will be people who battle back against it, at least initially. I’m more interested in people who continue to swerve in notable ways when everyone else is headed in a different direction. Earlier this season, I wrote about how we’re on pace for the best season of offense in men’s college basketball in 30 years. As of now, pretty much all of that is still true, whether you go by this specific day of the season:
Or the full season as a whole, which tells you that at minimum this is tracking to be the most offensively-friendly season of basketball since…1994? 1991? 1989? It’s all still on the table. Most importantly, though, is that three-point attempt rate. After the three-point line moved to the FIBA distance in summer 2019, the flattening out of 3PA% that seemed to have taken place over the following five years is no longer. In 2024-25, we’re taking more threes than we ever have.
This is despite the actual three-point percentage being on pace to tie for the lowest in history (2019-20’s 33.3%) and, through the first two months, being right in line with the results we’ve seen pretty consistently since the move of the three-point line. In fact, the average two-pointer has never been more valuable (1.02 points per shot), while the average three-pointer (0.999 PPS) is almost at a new low across modern history. If this holds, it will be the first season in college basketball’s 39-year history of tangling with the three that the two has actually had more per-shot value.
This is a phenomenon that’s already happening in the NBA, where three of the last four seasons, twos were more efficient than threes. Given the trickle-down effect of most changes in basketball, the only surprise here is that it’s arrived a little earlier than I personally anticipated. It’s hard to notice that in college basketball, though, where FIU - a team taking 30.5% of its shots from deep - has the 14th-lowest three-point attempt rate in the sport. Fifteen years ago, they would’ve nearly cracked the top 200.
Of course, we’d expect teams that feel they can hit a lot of threes to take a lot of threes. The correlation between 3PA and 3PT%, while not giant, is still +0.21, a weak positive correlation. But I feel like we’re already aware of teams taking a lot of threes. My question was the reverse: are there any interesting holdouts? Spurred on by a post from Friend of the Substack Dylan Burkhardt, I’d found my first subject:
No, not Indiana. Delaware State, who as of the time of writing had attempted far more catch-and-shoot (i.e., intentionally designed) two-point jumpers (85) than the last nine seasons of Nate Oats-coached teams combined (78). Not only is this important knowledge; so is the fact that with just 19.5% of their field goal attempts coming from three, they’re on pace for the lowest three-point attempt rate since 2016-17 Evansville’s 19.1%, itself the only sub-20% rate of the last 10 seasons.
Morgan State, as of today, is also on pace to take fewer than 20% of their shots from three. We haven’t had a season with any team below 20% since 2016-17, but we haven’t had a season with multiple sub-20% groups since 2012-13. The MEAC as a whole (which both schools belong to) routinely sits among the least 3PT-heavy conferences in the nation, but both of these are serious extremes.
Originally, this was about both teams, but I found myself a little bored by the Morgan State side of things, just because there’s an easy-enough explanation: they want to get to the rim, and based on roster construction, every foot further out from the rim is probably a worse shot.
The problem was this: the more I dug into Delaware State, the more questions I had and the more confused I became. How could a coach arrive at some seriously math-averse philosophy like theirs? How are you putting numbers on the boards for midrange jumpers we haven’t seen in almost a decade? As best as I could, I tried to find the rationale.
BEHIND THE WALL ($): MEAC Midrange Madness