College Basketball | Three-point shot brought range, change

On a spring day in Dallas in 1986, 13 men, many of them anonymous to college-basketball fans, walked into a meeting room. When they emerged, all they had done was change the game forever.

The group voted in the three-point shot at 19 feet, 9 inches for the 1986-87 season. Twenty years later, the distance has remained constant while the game was altered almost in more ways than can be enumerated.

Among them: You might not be as inclined to switch off the television during this week's Final Four if somebody draws out to a lead of 16 or 18 points. Last weekend, Georgetown trailed Vanderbilt by 13 points and Ohio State was down to Tennessee by 20, yet the Hoyas and Buckeyes lived to tell about it.

"There's no such thing as a safe lead anymore," says Indiana coach Kelvin Sampson.

Seemingly, there isn't. Xavier could have changed the face of the 2007 tournament, as it led Ohio State by nine with less than three minutes left in the second round. But a turnover here, a missed free throw there, and the Buckeyes tied the score on Ron Lewis' three with two seconds left, winning it in overtime.

Now, the game has wild mood swings. One minute, it looks kindly on USC, and the Trojans lead top-seeded North Carolina by 16 points early in the second half. At the finish, it's Tar Heels by 10.

About that committee: The most famous guy associated with it didn't even get to cast a ballot. That was Ed Steitz, a short, white-haired, grandfatherly man who was a non-voting secretary-editor of the group after a long career as coach and athletic director at Springfield College in Massachusetts.

Once the committee's work was done, Steitz, who died in 1990 at 70, became known in some circles as the "father of the three-point shot."

Today, Jerry Krause, director of basketball operations at Gonzaga, says only half-jokingly, "I get sick of hearing that Ed Steitz passed the three-point field goal. He didn't even have a vote."

Indeed, it was Krause, who had coached at Eastern Washington, who was committee chairman. But Steitz had been an impassioned ally of the three and he became the face of it. He's enshrined in the Naismith Hall of Fame in his hometown.

The committee thus made big news for the second consecutive year. In 1985, it voted in the 45-second shot clock, to be reduced eight years later to 35 seconds.

That measure removed the farcical, hold-the-ball strategy. Then came the three-pointer, creating a need to pay attention to the perimeter.

At the time of the rule change, there was heavy concern that the interior was too congested, post play was too rugged and too many teams were packing in zone defenses. The climate was underscored by the sudden rise of the brawny, physical Big East Conference, lightly officiated and dominating television.

Enter the trey, and a world that even the committee probably didn't envision.

"It clearly changed the game," says Gary Walters, NCAA selection-committee chairman who played with Bill Bradley at Princeton in the '60s. "Offensively, you see much less post play. You see more penetrate-and-kick. In fact, you're even seeing that in the pros."

Sampson agrees, saying, "In the offseason, there will be 100 programs trying to emulate the Phoenix Suns — penetrate and kick, and shoot threes."

NCAA statistics trace how the college game's style changed. The first year of the three, teams shot a better percentage (38.4) with the trey than they have since.

Year after year, they shot more of them, but less accurately, bottoming out to a 34.1 percentage in 1997. That number gradually began rising, creeping back up to 35 percent last year.

Seemingly, the coaching approach was: We're willing to live with some missed threes if we can impose our style, where multiple players are a threat to launch.

"Coaches and players really haven't screened for who can shoot perimeter shots effectively," says Krause. "Everybody shoots 'em."

In the NCAA first-round game between Indiana and Gonzaga, the Hoosiers failed to make a two-point basket for almost the first 15 minutes. But they hit seven threes in that time, and combined with tough defense, won comfortably.

"Today," says Sampson, "if you don't recruit kids who can make threes, you're going to struggle."

Some believe the three has become so devalued that the line must be moved back. Others, like Walters, advocate widening the lane to create more interior movement.

Krause believes widening the lane (now at 12 feet) makes no sense without a significant stretching of the three-point arc, arguing that the distance between the post and the line is so short now that a guard can defend the perimeter and still double back to help down low.

In fact, he says his opinion hasn't changed a whole lot since that day when he called for a committee vote.

"I favored going to the international distance [20 feet, six inches]," Krause says. "I said, 'I think we'll find it's going to be too short.' The test of time, I think, has shown that to be the facts."

Still, he says, "I think it's been good for the game."

Is any tinkering imminent when the committee meets in Indianapolis later this spring?

"It's fair to say it's being discussed," says committee member Brad Jackson, coach at Western Washington. "And it's been discussed for quite some time."

But nothing the committee does will rock the college-hoops world quite like it did in the spring of 1986.

Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com