The hotshots could go cold
Teams misfire at NRG Stadium
Houston — Oklahoma is one of the nation’s best threepoint shooting teams. Villanova is no slouch, either.
Their numbers don’t lie but neither do NRG Stadium’s. That’s where the Sooners and Wildcats will play their national semifinal game Saturday and also where a lot of three-point shots have just not gone in the basket.
There have been six NCAA Tournament games played in the home of the National Football League’s Houston Texans, but sizable crowds of 70,000-plus have seen misses at unusual rates for big-time college basketball.
In the six games — the 2011 Final Four and the 2015 South Regional — the 12 teams combined to shoot 27.6% (59 of 214) from threepoint range. Plenty of teams have bad games, but only three teams in all of college hoops shot 27.6% or worse on three-pointers this season: Robert Morris, Grambling State and Prairie View A&M.
Only one team playing at NRG — Duke last year — shot better than 33%, and that was 42.1% (8 of 19).
Oklahoma (29-7) is coming into the Final Four shooting 42.8% on three pointers — second in the nation — and Villanova (33-5) hits at a 35.4% clip.
Both teams had chances to shoot in the stadium Thursday and Friday and the stadium’s history didn’t seem to bother the Sooners.
“It’s just 94 feet with two goals,” said Jordan Woodward, who shot 45.9% from behind the arc this season. “Coach, he’s going to expect us to make shots no matter where we’re at. We have to make shots in order to win.”
Buddy Hield, who has earned a lot of hardware this week as a national player of the year, was fourth in the nation at 46.5%.
“We’ve been making shots all week,” he said. “We shouldn’t have the effect of shooting in an arena. I know it’s big, but we (are) going to light it up tomorrow for sure.”
Villanova coach Jay Wright had a team in the 2009 Final Four at Detroit’s Ford Field and the Wildcats played in the Carrier Dome every year when the Orange were in the Big East.
“I thought yesterday’s practice was really vital,” Wright said Friday.
“At the beginning, you could see we were a little off. But by the end of practice, I thought everybody was comfortable,” he said. “I really think by tomorrow night, everybody’s going to be fine, I really do. Once you get in there for a while, it’s going to make you comfortable.”
Sooners coach Lon Kruger said things weren’t smooth for his team when they started practice.
“We did shoot it well,” he said Friday. “The first couple (shots) were pretty bad. I was thinking, ‘Don’t let this get in their head.’ After that, we shot it pretty normally.”