Clemson’s men’s basketball team still has chances to boost its resume for the NCAA Tournament, but those opportunities are finite.
With the regular season in the books, all that’s left for the Tigers is this week’s ACC Tournament. As the No. 3 seed, Clemson (22-9 overall) has a double bye into Thursday’s quarterfinals, meaning the Tigers will play a maximum of three games in Greensboro. Of course, if they play that many and win all of them, that means Clemson earned the conference’s automatic bid and won’t have to fret over whether or not it’s going dancing.
If not, though, the Tigers will be sweating it out as an at-large hopeful. A win or two in the conference tournament would certainly help, but cutting down the nets Sunday is the only surefire way for Clemson to know it will be an NCAA Tournament team.
And if the Tigers go one and done in Greensboro, Clemson would have to let its body of work to this point do all of its talking. Following the Tigers’ 23-point win over Notre Dame in Saturday’s regular-season finale, Clemson coach Brad Brownell was asked what he thinks his team’s current resume would say to the NCAA Tournament selection committee.
“We’ve had some injuries at some inopportune times that have caused us some problems, but we’ve had a lot of performances like (Saturday),” Brownell said. “I know at one point here, we had four Quad 1 wins, and three of them were on the road. I think winning away from home is significant, and to do it like we did, I think it’s impressive. We’ve had a lot of games where we’ve beaten people handedly, which I think speaks to the quality of our play. We’ve had a couple of bad nights, but I just think if you look at who we’ve beaten and who we can play with, there’s no question we can go into the tournament and win multiple games.”
Clemson’s resume still includes four Quad 1 wins and seven combined wins against the first two quadrants. Among them are victories at Pitt and Virginia Tech, a home win over Duke and a sweep of NC State, which is being projected as an NCAA Tournament team. Of Clemson’s program-record 14 ACC wins, nine of them came by double digits, the most such wins in the conference.
Like all bubble teams, there’s some not so good mixed in there, too. The Tigers have four combined losses against the bottom two quadrants, including an ugly 10-point setback to a four-win Louisville team. Loyola-Chicago, another Quad 4 team, handed Clemson an 18-point loss during the non-conference portion of the schedule back in December.
Clemson won its first seven ACC games and 10 of its first 11 before losing four of its next five, a skid that started with a Quad 3 loss at Boston College. But the Tigers, who were without point guard Chase Hunter, Brevin Galloway and Alex Hemenway at different times during league play because of injuries, rebounded and head into the ACC Tournament winners of three of its last four. Clemson scored at least 87 points in three of those games and is averaging 83 points over its last six.
Brownell said that would all be part of his pitch to the selection committee.
“We’ve got a veteran team that’s good and has gotten better,” Brownell said. “PJ Hall was a shell of himself for probably most of the first six weeks of the season and is completely different now. I don’t know if all of those things will be considered, but I think we have a very good team that has played some high-level basketball at a lot of times this year.”
Brownell acknowledged he doesn’t know if Clemson has done enough in the eyes of the selection committee to receive an at-large bid. The only consensus seems to be that Clemson is squarely on the bubble with most prognosticators having the Tigers on the outside looking in at the moment.
ESPN’s Joe Lunardi has Clemson as the second team out of the 68-team field in his latest bracket projections released Sunday morning.
“We probably have to win (in the ACC Tournament) is what it looks like and what people tell us,” Brownell said. “But I’m not looking at it all the time. I look at it occasionally but not that much, to be honest with you.”