The 3-point shot has added volatility, variety at the top of the AP Top 25

North Carolina’s Roy Williams and Gonzaga’s Mark Few were a day from meeting for the 2017 national championship with teams relying heavily on imposing front lines. And the coaching buddies couldn’t overlook one oddity.

“He said, ‘You know, this is strange — it’s the first time all year long that we’ve had to defend a team with two big guys, it’s been go chase the 3-point shot,’” Williams recalled Few saying.

“I said, ‘But Mark, look around. … We’re the only two left standing,” Williams said.

It’s a moment the now-retired Hall of Fame coach said the two have chuckled about since. It illustrates how much college basketball has changed since the arrival of the 3-point shot for the 1986-87 season. It has certainly been a factor in The Associated Press Top 25 men’s college basketball poll as it turns 75 years old.

There have been more upsets and more turnover at the top as the shot became a rankings-altering fixture.

“It’s the equalizer,” said Williams, who won three NCAA titles at UNC before stepping aside in 2021. “In the old days, three or four teams would rotate 1-2-3 in the country, and those were the most talented teams, and a lot of years those were the teams that had the best big men or best people the attacked the rim.”

It’s certainly made things more interesting, and volatile considering how the shot itself has made even the best of teams vulnerable to a hot-shooting upstart.

In the poll’s first 38 seasons before the 3-point shot, there were an average of 2.61 teams to hold the No. 1 ranking each year. That average has increased to 3.95 in the 37 seasons that followed with the 3.

Before the 3, there were 10 seasons in which one team went wire-to-wire at the top all season. There have been only four since, most recently Few’s Zags in 2020-21.

There were only three seasons with at least five different teams holding the No. 1 ranking before the 3-pointer. In the years since, that number has swelled to 16.

And it’s been easy to see that impact so far in this season’s upsets. Look no further than current No. 2 Purdue, led by 7-foot-4 Zach Edey as the returning AP national player of the year, seeing Northwestern and Nebraska shoot a combined 24 of 43 (56%) from behind the arc in stunning upsets when the Boilermakers were ranked No. 1.

ACC Network analyst Luke Hancock, the most outstanding player of the 2013 Final Four in Louisville’s later-vacated title run, said the 3 has long offered smaller teams a way to compete by offsetting a size or talent disadvantage.

“It’s spacing, it’s creating driving lanes,” Hancock said. “Everybody’s talking about paint touches and then kicking to open shooters. ……