By Will Vandervort

Don’t tell Brad Brownell his team does not play hard.

Granted, Clemson has lost nine of its last 10 games as it heads into the first-round of the ACC Tournament on Thursday, but it’s not from a lack of effort. Consider this, the Tigers found themselves tied at halftime at No. 9 Miami last Sunday with their best player on the bench in foul trouble and Miami playing for a league championship.

“We just played the first place team in the league, which is playing to win the league,” Brownell said Tuesday before Clemson left for Greensboro, NC. “They are playing to win the league, okay. They had just lost to Georgia Tech and maybe they did not play quite as hard or well that night, and we really had nothing to play for. I mean zero.

“Tenth seed, eleventh seed, does it really matter? But it is twenty five all at the half. Our starting center is in foul trouble, on the bench and we are just grinding.”

Eventually Miami’s talent took over and another scoring drought from Clemson didn’t help either in the second half as the Hurricanes pulled away for a 62-49 victory.

“Our guys were fighting and scratching, and I think we have done that in most games,” Brownell said.

So what has happened to cause the Tigers’ confidence to go south?

Try a win one-point loss to NC State, where Scott Wood drains a three with one second left to down Clemson. Try a two-point loss to Miami the very next week when Kenny Kadji hit a trifecta from the left wing with 31 seconds left to lift the Hurricanes.

Understand that both of those losses came at home and in both instances Clemson had control of the game and for the most part outplayed both teams. Those two games alone, are a microcosm of the Tigers’ 2012-’13 season.

“I’m not ashamed with the way this team has competed,” Brownell said. “We just have not been good enough and I have not been able to find a way to help them win and that’s on me.”

Brownell says he asks himself all the time, “What do we need to do to figure out a way to coach these guys better?”

When a team isn’t winning, it is easy to question everything they are doing, from the practices, to the preparation, to what they do during a game.

“Do we need to play faster? Do we need to play slower? Do we need to run more sets? Do we need to let them go? You question everything,” Brownell said. “Some coaches may get up here and say ‘We are just doing it the way we do it and that is the way we do it.’

“That’s fine, but I have never been at schools where we had the best players and we could just do it that way. We are always trying to tinker and figure things out. That’s one of the things I learned from my college coach when I worked for him. You are constantly trying to figure who is playing well, who to play, why to play them, how to play, changing things and tweaking things to get better.

“We just have not been able to figure it out with this group.”