By Will Vandervort.

It’s safe to say the last four days have been long ones for the Clemson basketball team. After playing perhaps is best game in a victory over Syracuse last Saturday, the Tigers followed with one of its worst efforts of the season in disappointing loss to Florida State on Monday night.

“There are going to be times in this league when we don’t play well and don’t win. That happens. I’m fine with that,” Clemson head coach Brad Brownell said. “But when we don’t do the things we practiced and we don’t play in a way we should play, I’m obviously frustrated by that, and I was frustrated by our performance on Monday. I was really disappointed. We should have played better.”

Brownell reminded his players how bad they played against Florida State prior to both Wednesday’s and Thursday’s practices. On Wednesday he broke down the tape of how bad they played on offense, while on Thursday he did the same thing defensively.

“We watch film as a team often, but he called me in and we looked at different reads I missed during the game and some things he gave me to work on so I just kind of worked on that in practice,” said Clemson guard Rod Hall as the Tigers prepare to host Wake Forest at Littlejohn Coliseum today.

“It was a good learning experience,” Hall continued. “We kind of looked at some of the rotations we gave up and some of the rotations we missed and them making those layups killed us. It was something that could have changed the whole game if we stop some of those layups and rotate in the position we are supposed to be in.”

Usually for Hall and the rest of his teammates, they can put a loss like Florida State behind them within a day or two, part of the culture in today’s sports world where there are tons of distractions like cell phones, social media and much more. Most of the time Brownell is fine with his players getting over a defeat so quickly and moving on to the next game, but he wanted the FSU loss to linger a little longer. He wanted them to see how bad they played and we wanted it to resonate inside of them a little longer than usual.

“You get done with a game, I’m sure it is like this in every sport, immediately everyone picks up their phone and you are in contact with the outside world and you are on to the next thing. That’s not always good,” Brownell said. “I think back several years ago, especially when you were on the road, if you lost a game, there were no cell phones and everybody on that bus riding back was not real happy and there was not a lot of talk. It was pretty quiet.

“You were expected to think a little bit about how you did not play at your ability level or your best. With AAU and playing so many games, and I have said this before, it just encourages you of putting those things past you and I don’t think that is always good. I think you need to be reminded when you are not performing at your best enough.”

Brownell put the loss to Florida State to bed officially midway through Thursday’s practice and used the rest of the time and all of Friday on the Demon Deacons, a team that had Louisville, Duke and Syracuse on the ropes before eventually falling in close losses.

New head coach Danny Manning, who led Kansas to a National Championship in 1988 as a player, has Wake playing perhaps its best basketball in several years.

The Demon Deacons (9-10, 1-5 ACC) are the most efficient offensive team in the conference coming in as they have scored at least 71 points in all five ACC games. Clemson has scored 71 points or more only once in its six conference games.

Wake Forest is led by guard Codi Miller-McIntyre (13.6 ppg, 4.0 apg) and forward Devin Thomas (12.9 ppg, 9.8 rpg), who make it a very hard team to beat.

“They have two outstanding players. When you have two outstanding scorers that can go for 25 points, it makes them very dangerous,” Brownell said. “They play in a way that they can score so that always makes for a dangerous team to play.”