Then there's the question of cost. As Birmingham-Southern athletic director and rules committee member Joe Dean points out, it costs about $15,000 to strip and re-paint a 3-point line and significantly more to create a new lane. That might not seem like a lot of scratch to wealthy Division I schools, but lower-tier programs would have to feel strong to approve that investment. That's one reason why Dean is opposed to either moving the line back or widening the lane. "Personally, I'm not in favor of it, but I think I'm in the minority on the committee, " Dean says. "The data shows the shooting percentages don't change that much, and I have my doubts about whether there's too much rough play in the post."

Given all these factors, the committee has to be careful about over-reaching the way it did two years ago, when it voted to move the line back and adopt the international trapezoid lane -- only to have its decision overturned by the NCAA's executive committee marking the first time a basketball committee vote has been shot down by the higher-ups.

The committee actually began this process six years ago by tinkering with the wider lane, but coaches argued that if you do that, you have to move back the 3-point line to create better spacing. During the national coaches' meeting at the Final Four in St. Louis, many coaches said they weren't crazy about widening the lane but they still wanted a deeper 3. "That was kind of eye-opening," says Detroit coach Perry Watson, who chairs the rules committee. "A lot of people at the Final Four were saying the 3-point shot has become something it wasn't intended to become. Maybe if you move it back, it'll bring the game back to the way it's supposed to be played."

Wake Forest coach Skip Prosser, who is beginning his first year on the rules committee, says he is inclined to vote for the change but is keeping an open mind. "I think the shot has become too routine," Prosser says, not withstanding the fact that his Demon Deacons led the ACC last season in 3-point shooting and were third in 3s made per game. Dunphy adds that he feels it's in the game's best interest to "standardize" by adopting the international distance, and he dismisses the data suggesting a longer shot wouldn't make much difference. "Teams will adjust," Dunphy says." Just logically, you'd have to deduce it will be a less accurate shot at 20 feet, 6 inches than it is at 19 feet, 9 inches."

If the committee wants to explore this question further before voting on it, it could test the idea of putting the line at 20 feet, 6 inches without widening the lane, an experiment it has yet to try. But there doesn't seem much point in doing so. "It's senseless to experiment again because we're just going to get the same data we've gotten for the last two years," says former Springfield College coach Ed Billick, who has been the committee's secretary-rules editor for 10 years. "The lane has no interactive effect on the 3-point line. I honestly feel we'd just be spinning our wheels."

In other words, it's time to shoot or get off the pot.