By Will Vandervort
You hear it all the time, “It’s hard to beat the same team three times.” But is there really something to that or not?
“I hope there is something to do that. I don’t know,” Clemson head coach Brad Brownell said.
History says there really is not anything to it at all. Only five times in the 59-year history of the Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament has Clemson defeated a team it lost to twice in the regular season. The Tigers will try to make today’s first round game with Florida State the sixth when the two tip off at 9 p.m. at the Greensboro Coliseum.
The Seminoles (17-14, 9-9 ACC) swept Clemson this year with a five-point victory on Jan. 5 at Littlejohn Coliseum and then a three-point win on Jan. 24 in Tallahassee, FL, thanks to a 28-foot prayer that Michael Snaer banked in as time expired.
“It is just one of those sayings,” Clemson forward Milton Jennings said.
Is it? Though history agrees says there really isn’t much to it, there is history in the Clemson-FSU series that states otherwise. All three times in this series, the team who won the two regular season games lost the third matchup in the ACC Tournament.
The Tigers won in 1993 and in 2001 to avoid three losses to FSU in a season, while the Seminoles achieved the same feat in 2007 after Clemson had taken the two regular season games.
“I don’t really know. I’ll be honest with you, I think it is just another situation,” Brownell said.
It’s a different situation because it has been more than five weeks since the two teams have played one another and a lot of things have changed since then. Brownell has rarely come across Florida State on film when scouting other opponents during that time because they were not playing common opponents.
Remember, this was the first year of the ACC’s 18-game regular season schedule.
“This one seems different too because maybe it is so long ago,” Brownell said. “If we just played them maybe a week ago and everything was fresh, that would be one thing, but it was so long ago that it almost feels like you have not played them.”
Regardless, Clemson (13-17, 5-13 ACC) will have to play better than it has the last five weeks. The Tigers enter the tournament with a six-game losing streak and nine losses in their last 10 games. Florida State on the other hand has won three of its last four games.
“We are going to have to make shots,” Brownell said. “We are not a team that shot the ball very well this year. We are going to have to make shots to win our games, at least more than we have been making.”
Clemson did not shoot the ball well at all in its previous to meetings against the Seminoles. It made only 38.9 percent from the field in the first meeting and the second meeting was not much better at 40 percent.
Maybe that can change tonight at the Greensboro Coliseum. During their shoot around Wednesday the Tigers resembled more of a good shooting team than a squad that ranked 11th in the ACC this season in field goal percentage.
“It looked like we made some shots today so hopefully the Coliseum is the place we need to be playing,” Brownell said.
And maybe it is the place where history will repeat itself once again in the Clemson-Florida State series.