In College Basketball, Cavernous Stadiums Tend to Dampen Shooting
By MARC TRACY
MARCH 31, 2016
This weekend, next door to the vacant yet inexplicably still standing Astrodome, there is reason to believe that the shooting at NRG Stadium in the Final Four could be similarly wanting.
The N.C.A.A.’s own statistics show that shooting percentages fall slightly in domes compared with arenas. But there is some evidence that the problem is particularly acute at NRG, the home of the N.F.L.’s Houston Texans. (Its retractable roof will be closed during the Final Four.)
The college basketball statistician Ken Pomeroy wrote last year of a much-discussed “NRG Effect.” In 15 college basketball games played here — some with setups in which the court was not placed at the center of the field, as it is in the Final Four, but to one side, with a curtain drawn and not all seats filled — teams made only 32.2 percent of their 3-point attempts, for an average decline of 0.76 3-pointers per team per game from the expected totals.
“This could be the result of cataclysmic randomness, but if a team shot 32.2 percent over 30 games, you’d be pretty convinced they weren’t a very good shooting team,” Pomeroy wrote. He further noted that several of the teams that had played here, such as Gonzaga in last year’s South Regional, were quite good outside-shooting teams.
In an email this week, Pomeroy said he would guess that the actual effect was slightly less than what the numbers showed, but that he stood by his post.
“It’s possible for three games that teams will shoot well,” he added, alluding to Saturday’s national semifinals and Monday’s national championship game.
The last Final Four game played here was Connecticut’s 53-41 national title win over Butler in 2011, in which the Bulldogs shot 18.8 percent from the field — the worst showing in an N.C.A.A. championship game since 1941.
