Miami Hurricanes coach Jim Larranaga knows a thing or two about what the players and coaches of Loyola-Chicago are going through this week, pegged as 5.5-point underdogs to Michigan in the Final Four. Larranaga was the bench boss of the 2006 George Mason team that made it all the way to the national semifinal.
His George Mason side got stream rolled by a Florida team packed with future NBA players in the 2006 semis, but it was the venue not the players on the other side of the court that intimidated his guys according to Larranaga.
“When you go into a football stadium where the basketball court is, it’s such a huge venue, it doesn’t seem like you’re there to play basketball,” he told the USA Today. “And I think that impacted our players, their shooting.”
Ah, this has become a popularized theory that it’s more difficult to shoot in domes or football stadiums because of the different backdrop and the unfamiliarity with the court setup inside a giant venue like this year at the Alamodome in San Antonio. But Ken Pomery and FiveThirtyEight.com both conducted studies and found there wasn’t any evidence to support the theory.
Both summarized that team offense and opposing team defense impact shooting performances and venues don’t. That doesn’t mean what Larranga says isn’t true about his George Mason team. The contrast in settings for a team like Loyola-Chicago accustomed to playing in front of 5,000 spectators to the 72,000 that will be in attendance at the Alamodome in San Antonio is huge.
It reminds me of one of my favorite scene from the movie Hoosiers when the Hickory team sees the state championship gym for the first time.
Loyola-Chicago isn’t Hickory High but the few mid-major teams that made appearances in the Final Four struggled to shoot on the big stage. We looked at the four small-conference and small-budget basketball programs that made it to the Final Four to see how they shot from the field and from 3-point land with the big lights on.
We didn’t include Gonzaga because while it plays in a tiny conference Mark Few’s team is an NCAA Tournament staple. They were a freaking No. 1 last year for Pete’s sake.
Here’s what we found for total field goal percentage:
There’s a dip for sure but it’d be fair to chalk that up to improved competition.
Here’s what we found for just 3-point shooting in the Final Four:
The drop in 3-point shooting percentages is a bit more alarming. Each team shot worse than their season average and significantly worse than what they’d done in the previous round of the tournament.
The separation between Loyola-Chicago and Michigan probably isn’t as great as it was between Larranaga’s George Mason and Florida. That doesn’t mean the Ramblers will be immune to the same shooting problems the Patriots had.
The Missouri Valley champs are shooting almost 42 percent from 3-point range in the NCAA and have scored nearly 33 percent of their total points from outside. On the season, the Ramblers connected at a 40.2 percent clip from distance (11th in the country) and relied on those triples for 31 percent of their total offensive output. So, it's safe to say a poor shooting performance - due to venue or opponent - would be especially crushing to this Cinderella school.
“The depth perception is different,” Larranaga said about the RCA Dome – the location of the 2006 Final Four. “There’s no background. The fans are not on top of you. There’s not that adrenaline rush that you get when you score a basket because even the noise when they cheer just goes straight up to the roof.”
Those are all disadvantages Michigan would share but the team is a bit more familiar with the big stage and not as reliant on the 3-ball, picking up just over 20 percent of its points from beyond the arc in the NCAA. The Wolverines played all four of its conference tournament games at Madison Square Garden.
Oddsmakers have the Ramblers as 5.5-point underdogs against Michigan with the total set at 129.5.
**video
