During each game in Cameron Indoor Stadium, the graduate student sections have an important task — distracting the opposing team’s free-throw shooters. Stationed behind each basket, graduate students are perfectly positioned to tilt the game in Duke’s favor with an arsenal of distractions.

Over the past four years, I’ve attended nearly every Duke men’s basketball home game. During these games, I or a proxy (thanks Alex and Oscar) have recorded each free-throw attempt, the accompanying distraction and the result of the shot. I previously published an analysis from the 2021-22 and 2022-23 seasons but now present additional data from the two most recent seasons. Any distractions used fewer than five times in the past four years were not included. In total, 616 free-throw attempts were included.

A few disclaimers before jumping into the data; this isn’t intended to be a methodologically rigorous analysis. There are many confounding factors affecting whether a given player makes a shot aside from student distractions, and these aren’t accounted for here. Free-throw shooters have different baseline averages, and some distractions are used more often than others, leading to discrepant sample sizes potentially driving false trends in the data. Furthermore, the quality of each distraction may differ depending on the number of students present and the energy they put into it.

Here’s a quick reminder adapted from my last story about the various distractions:

We’ll start with a self-explanatory one. Students hunch down and stay quiet until the free-throw shooter begins his motion, at which point they leap into the air and yell to provide both a visual and auditory discombobulation. 

Affectionately named after a football referee’s mechanic when a member of the offense moves early, this distraction is when students form fists with both hands and rapidly rotate them around each other, alternating between above-the-head and chin heights. 

In this distraction, students first place their palms together at chest level. Then, they move their hands upward in a serpentine fashion, curving to the left and to the right until their arms have fully reached above their head, similar to a football referee’s signal for a safety. 

Students create an artificial shot clock for the free-throw shooter, calling out a countdown starting at 10 and going to zero. This distraction is also accompanied by a hand gesture where students hold up a number of fingers corresponding to the number of seconds remaining on the clock. 

Without further ado, here’s the proportion of missed free throws over the past four years, sorted by the distractions outlined above.

A few takeaways from the data:

I hope that this information can continue to guide the selection of free-throw distractions in the coming seasons. Generally, it seems that the most effective distractions are also the most frequent, but there are some exceptions to this pattern that may be useful areas to address in future years. 

Finally, creating new distractions that are similar to those shown to be most effective may be another exciting direction in the coming years. As someone who has been a Duke student for eight years, I’ve gained an appreciation for how Cameron Crazies can truly affect the game. I’ll be excited to follow along from afar and invite anyone else with an interest in free-throw distraction science to take up the mantle and continue this data-keeping next year and beyond.