Brad Brownell details adversity Clemson faced over past week

The Clemson basketball team was on an absolute tear going into the heart of conference play, sporting an 11-1 record and firing on all cylinders. But the start of conference play has not gone great.

The Tigers lost three straight games before topping Boston College to win their second ACC game. But that three-game stretch showed coach Brad Brownell quite a bit.

“You know, it’s funny. It’s been an interesting; obviously watched all the games a million times in the last two weeks and scouting can run together, but it’s crazy you can forget that we actually played a pretty good first half against Miami,” Brownell said. “We had a six-point lead. We actually had an eight-point lead, on the first play we ran a play, got it to PJ (Hall), he got fouled, made two free throws. Obviously about the last 16 minutes of the game were not good. And Miami had a lot to do with it. They made unbelievable shots, the game got crazy.”

Following that road trip to Miami and the loss to the Hurricanes, Clemson had to turn around and play host to No. 8 North Carolina. The Tar Heels are playing like one of the best teams in the country, and it was a good battle for a while.

“And we bounced back, it was an unbelievably quick turnaround and we battled our tails off against North Carolina,” Brownell said. “I was upset with our guys with our second half at Miami. Probably said that on the radio and elsewhere. But I was really proud of our team against North Carolina. When your guys don’t make shots; but our effort, our fight, our defensive intensity. I mean Carolina’s playing as well as anybody right now. And that was a closer game than 65-55. It was a couple possession game all night, both teams back and forth battling. We just didn’t make shots.”

From there, a trip to Virginia Tech was on tap as Clemson now looked to break out of a two-game losing skid in conference play. After two tiring games, though, the Tigers looked out of gas.

Virginia Tech won 87-72.

“And what’s hard about that is you lose a game like Miami and you’ve been winning, then you’ve got to gear back up and you fill your tank up and then you empty it against North Carolina, give everything you have and it doesn’t, you don’t win,” Brownell said. “And now you’ve got to fill it back up with no guarantee of winning. I talked to my guys about that before Virginia Tech, and we didn’t empty our tank. We didn’t play as well or as hard as we needed to against a Virginia Tech team that was very hungry. And again, we let two guys go crazy and we got beat. So that’s the one of the three, it’s like no disrespect to Virginia Tech, it was like we didn’t do what we needed to do. And so that one hurt.”

Clemson did bounce back to snap the three-game losing skid with a win over Boston College, but a Tuesday night game against Georgia Tech resulted in a double-overtime loss, dropping the Tigers to just 2-4 in ACC play.