Welcome to the second round of the NCAA Tournament — or, given what college basketball has become, the National Spring Team Three-Point Shooting Championship. Here’s a statistic for you: not one losing team on Saturday shot better from downtown, percentage-wise, than its conqueror. At least three teams — Duke, Kansas State, and Pittsburgh — were entirely undone because of their insistence on shooting the three despite not being able to hit a cow’s arse with a banjo, so to speak. Duke contrived to miss 15 three-pointers in a row. Kansas State missed all 13 that they attempted. Pittsburgh was 2-for-17, Notre Dame was 3-17, UNLV was 5-for-22.

Back in the eighties, Rick Pitino and Jerrry Tarkanian were the first college coaches to figure out that — hey! — shooting threes is, like, 50% more valuable than shooting ten-foot jumpers. And so both coached their teams to fire away from downtown, knowing that they could be less effective from outside and still compete. As they figured, this would this spread the floor and create offensive rebounding opportunities.

Here’s the thing, though: this seems like such a tenuous thing to depend on, come tournament time. It’s like running the run-and-shoot offense in football, without a ground game to back it up: if it’s windy or your quarterback is having an off day or your line can’t get its pass-blocking calls right, you lose. It’s the same in college hoops: if your guys aren’t used to the rims or are tired from playing twice in three days and have no legs, suddenly your shots start finding the front of the rim. And then all of a sudden you’re 3-for-15 from downtown and losing by eight and everybody’s confidence is shot from outside and you have no ground game to pound it inside and make a comeback from the free-throw line, and so you go down in flames, all because your offense depends on 20-foot jumpers.

On the other hand, it’s easier to find shooters than it is to find slashers and low-post scorers, and coaches know what Pitino learned: your team always has a chance to shoot 60% from behind the arc and thus beat a team it has no business beating. Maybe it’s a good thing that they’re moving the arc back a foot next year; twelve months from now, things might depend more on basketball and less on long-distance shooting.

That said: you can expect more of the same today. Here’s the local broadcast schedule:
11:10 a.m. - Siena vs. Villanova
1:50 p.m. - Davidson vs. Georgetown
4:15 p.m. - Arkansas vs. UNC

Here’s hoping that, this time tomorrow, your brackets won’t be completely busted. (Mine are already. But I expected nothing more.)

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