Notre Dame guard Kyle McAlarney couldn’t be happier about college basketball’s new 3-point line. McAlarney and his Fighting Irish teammates got their first look at the extended line in April, when they began offseason workouts at the Notre Dame practice facility. A few days later, Mike Brey asked for a reaction to the move from 19'9" to 20'9".

“No problem, Coach,” McAlarney said.  “Don’t worry about it.”

Of course McAlarney spends most of his practice time taking aim from a distance beyond the even longer NBA arc, so stepping back an extra foot for his senior season in South Bend isn’t an inconvenience. McAlarney is thrilled in large part because he thinks college basketball’s altered dimension will restore a certain order to the game.

“I think it weeds out a lot of shooters — or non-shooters — who have thrown in a lot of threes here and there,” says McAlarney, who shot 44.1 percent from 3-point range on a Notre Dame team that made 8.3 threes per game last season. “For good shooters I don’t think it’s going to make any difference.

“But I don’t think you will see a guy like Roy Hibbert throwing them in any more.”

That’s nothing personal against the former big man for the Georgetown Hoyas, but in McAlarney’s mind the 3-point shot wasn’t designed for 7'2" centers destined to earn their paychecks throwing elbows in the NBA paint. Hibbert finished his college career 3-of-3 behind the line, and all three of those shots came last season, including a memorable game-winner against Connecticut in an important Big East Conference game.

But the members of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Rules Committee must have felt a sense of satisfaction when Hibbert made those headlines. It was that committee that finally recommended the move in May 2007, after 20 years of debate. Despite a constituency that seemingly believes there should never be any change, the prevailing thought was that the line was too close at 19'9" when it was introduced for the 1986-87 season.

“Nineteen feet is a Mickey Mouse shot,” Hall of Fame coach Lou Carnesecca of St. John’s said at the time.

When the 2008-09 season begins, the new length will mark the first dimensional change to the college court since the 3-pointer was added.

“It’s an exciting play,” says Ed Bilik, secretary-rules editor and national interpreter of the Men’s Basketball Rules Committee for the past 12 years. “When we first put the 3-point shot in, we were hopeful it would be similar to the home run in baseball. But, you know, everyone doesn’t hit a home run. And it got to the point in basketball where everyone could shoot from the 3-point line from 19'9".

“That was part of the rationale in terms of moving the line to make it more challenging because of the changing characteristics of the players playing the game today.”

So there you have it. The reason the line is being moved back: too many home runs.

Louisville coach Rick Pitino is among those celebrating the decision. He has been in favor of moving the line back for years.

“The line was so short,” Pitino said. “I’m 55 (years old) and I could go out there and shoot 45 percent if nobody played defense on me. It really was too short. Inferior shooters ended up taking it. And that’s not good.”

Pitino didn’t wait until April to put the new line down on Louisville’s practice floor. He wanted his players to begin their adjustment as soon as the rule change was approved after the 2007 season. And while some college guards were still adjusting to the change this summer, the overriding reaction is that the new line won’t change 3-point shooting too much and the impact on the game will be subtle.

“It’s not that far back, just a couple of inches,” Texas guard A.J. Abrams says, chuckling at his own assessment. “Most of my shots were not hugging up on the 3-point line. I’m pretty comfortable with the distance and I’m not too worried about it.

“The NBA line (23'9" at the top of the key) is real different. It took me a couple of days to get comfortable shooting that. But I think it got me kind of ready for the college line this year.”

Abrams got that taste of the professional length while working out for NBA teams before the NBA Draft. When he decided to withdraw from the draft and return to the Longhorns for his senior season, he joined McAlarney, Davidson’s Stephen Curry and Miami’s Jack McClinton as the top shooters who will get the first crack at the new NCAA line.

This will not be a revolutionary change to college basketball, at least not in comparison to the advent of the 3-point shot itself 22 seasons ago or the widening of the lane (from six to 12 feet) in 1956. NCAA statistics show that teams shot 38.4 percent from 3-point range in that first season and that mark was never matched or topped. The combined percentage dropped as low as 34.10 in 1997, then gradually climbed back to 35.23 in 2007-08. Last season also produced the highest averages for threes made (6.72) and attempted (19.07). Those numbers have grown dramatically since the 1986-87 season when 38 fewer teams averaged 3.5 made threes in 9.2 attempts.

The rules committee took its time while studying the impact of moving the line. The decision came after years of experimenting with the line, both at the international distance of 20'6" and at 20'9", during 144 exempt games.

“Research did tell us the number of shots came down slightly and the shooting percentage decreased insignificantly,” Bilik says. “I don’t think we’re going to see a drastic effect in terms of either the number of shots that are taken or the shooting percentage taken from that line. I think it will stay relatively the same.

“The concern is that we want to keep the      3-point shot in proper proportion in reference to the overall shots that are being taken in the game. That, we would hope, would fall somewhere in the range of 28-32 percent of the overall shots. It will keep us there.”

The 3-pointer was viewed as a radical change in 1986, and the primary purpose was to unclog the lane under the basket. That area of the court had been bogged down by an increase in zone defenses. At the same time, teams were relying more on their big men and the slam-dunk. Outside shooting was becoming a lost art.

No one utilized the three better that first year than Pitino, who converted the Providence Friars from cellar dwellers in the Big East into a Final Four squad with a lethal weapon. Pitino’s three-guard offense of Billy Donovan, Delray Brooks and Ernie “Pop” Lewis triggered the revolution.

“I was looking for a gimmick,” Pitino says. “We had a team that was marginal at best and (the three) fit right into our plans. We had a shooter on the right wing corner, a shooter on the left wing corner, and we had Billy Donovan penetrating. We started the season saying we wanted to make five per game and take anywhere from 12 to 15 per game. Then we played the Russians in the preseason. After playing the Russians, I changed my entire philosophy. I realized my numbers were way too low. I increased it to eight made and 20-25 taken.”

With the new line, the prevailing goal relates to spacing. By moving the line 12 inches back from the center of the basket, the committee hopes it has created more room for half-court offenses to function. Coaches will face a big question on defense. They may find collapsing into the lane to contain penetration or to double-team in the low-post will make it too difficult to recover on the perimeter. That could leave more 3-point shooters unchallenged.

“It will be good for spacing and offense,” Vanderbilt coach Kevin Stallings says. “It will bring the post play back in a bit. More people might try to zone initially to see if that distance is a difference-maker in terms of percentages, but I don’t think the game will change much. … It is going to make some things more difficult in terms of double-teaming the post because now you have a little bit of longer closeout.”

And that’s terrific news for North Carolina and Connecticut, two favorites to win the national championship in 2009. Tar Heels coach Roy Williams was glad the rules committee did not widen the lane in conjunction with the new 3-point line. Now, North Carolina can maintain its emphasis on pounding the ball inside to Tyler Hansbrough and enjoy even better floor spacing with the shooting of Wayne Ellington and Danny Green. Only 18.8 percent of North Carolina’s scoring last season came on threes, the lowest percentage of any NCAA Tournament team. UConn was second-lowest at 19.7 percent. Even though coach Jim Calhoun has a recruiting class that will enhance the Huskies’ outside shooting, UConn will still rely on feeding the ball inside to Hasheem Thabeet and Jeff Adrien.

“I like the game open,” Calhoun says. “I think when a guy drives to the rim and dunks on somebody, it’s a hell of an exciting basketball play. Everybody says dunking is not exciting. All the people who say that can’t dunk. But the give-and-go, and alley-oop plays — those are exciting plays. They take coordination and they take practice.”

Alabama coach Mark Gottfried understands the intent of the new rule. But he has a very different vision of the actual impact.

“I think the rule is intended to stretch the defenses out and open up the middle of the floor,” Gottfried says. “I think the opposite may end up happening. If you’re playing against a team that can’t make the new 3-point shot with a very high percentage, you’re going to see defenses start to step back and clog up the middle. … My personal opinion is that teams are going to start packing the defenses in.”

It’s possible that successful mid-major programs that have achieved so much success in recent years will be hurt the most by the new rule. Butler, Drake, Davidson, Belmont and Portland State are among the programs that collected good shooters and used the 3-pointer as an equalizer against teams from the top six power conferences. Butler could put five 3-point shooters on the floor at the same time last season. Of the 65 NCAA Tournament teams, Butler made the most use of the three, scoring 40.9 percent of its points behind the arc. “You look at a lot of the mid-majors and, in some of their great wins, they scorched it from the old line,” Brey says. “They came out and shot it freely.”

If better spacing does return to half-court offenses it will be interesting to see if the new rule initiates the return of the mid-range jump shot. According to data from nearly 4,000 games over the past five seasons, fewer than half as many shots have been taken between 10 and 15 feet as compared to between 20 and 25 feet.

“What’s striking is that accuracy in the mid-range is less than it is for the closest 3-point shots,” Ken Pomeroy wrote on Basketball Prospectus in February. “If a player can be as accurate from 20 feet, with a little practice, as he is from 15, then why practice the 15-footers if you’re just going to cheat yourself out of a point?”

Coaches and players will have to determine whether those philosophies still fit at the new distance. “I don’t see it having much impact with our team,” says Baylor coach Scott Drew, whose team led the Big 12 with 8.6 threes per game. “But I’m sure some coaches now will be a little more choosy in whom they give the green light to in regard to shooting the three.”

Calhoun keeps statistics on all of his shooters in practice and tells his players they have to “earn the right to pull the trigger.” He promises to be more diligent enforcing that rule with the new line.

Says Brey: “Does it put coaches in a position to be able to say to guys, who probably shouldn’t even have been shooting the old shot, ‘Hey Jimmy, with the new line, you’re definitely not taking it. Get your butt in the lane’? It should. So it may help some coaches define some roles again.”

And that’s just fine with Kyle McAlarney.

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