Clemson coach Brad Brownell makes final pitch to NCAA tourney committee

On3 imageby:Matt Connolly03/12/23

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Clemson coach Brad Brownell believes his team has done enough to earn one of the 36 at-large bids for the NCAA Tournament.

He will find out later on Sunday if that is indeed the case.

Clemson is squarely on the bubble ahead of the NCAA Tournament selection show, which will take place at 6 p.m. on Sunday.

Brownell made one final pitch to the committee while speaking with ESPN Sunday morning after he was asked to detail why he believes his team should make the tourney.

“Eye test – I think just watching our team play,” Brownell said. “I mean Hunter Tyson and PJ Hall voted as two of the top 12 or 13 players in the ACC. We have the second best defense and the fifth best offense. We won 14 ACC games. I just think if you watch our team play, and you’ve seen us throughout the year, we look like one of the top teams in the country to be in this tournament.”

The Tigers are 23-10 and finished 14-6 in the ACC, earning the No. 3 seed in the ACC Tournament.

No top 3 seed in the ACC tourney has missed the NCAA Tournament since Virginia in 2000.

Clemson has a NET of No. 60 and is 7-6 in Quad 1 and Quad 2 games, including beating Duke, Pitt at Pitt and NC State all three times the teams faced off.

“We obviously are 7-6 against Quad 1 and 2s. That’s not as many as some other leagues maybe in the high major. But 7-6 – very few people have a winning record in their Quad 1 and 2 games,” Brownell said.

“Jay [Bilas] always likes to talk about who can you beat and where can you beat them. Most of those wins are away from home. We have three Quad 1 wins away from home. Only one of our Quad 1s is at home. We didn’t get very many Quad 1 home games. So I think we’ve proven we can win away from home.”

Pitt and NC State are also considered to be on the bubble, as is Penn State.

Clemson beat all three of those teams this season.

“We’re also on the bubble with some teams that we’ve had a lot of success against – a couple of teams in our league, and then even Penn State, who we happened to play in the nonconference,” Brownell said. “We’ve done a lot against a lot of teams that are like ourselves.”

The knock on Clemson is its bad losses to South Carolina, Loyola Chicago and Louisville and its overall poor strength of schedule in the nonconference.

That wasn’t by design, though.

Clemson played five nonconference games away from home, faced four Power 5 teams and scheduled mid-majors Loyola and Richmond, who both made the NCAA Tournament last season.

“The nonconference is really hard to control. We tried to schedule up. You can’t control who you get sometimes. We lost a game to Iowa, a last-second loss. We get a game against Cal, and unfortunately Cal’s having a terrible season. You just don’t know those things,” Brownell said.

“Richmond, Loyola Chicago. We scheduled some nonconference games away from home. We really didn’t schedule very many home games, trying to schedule up a little bit, but some of the teams that we played didn’t fair as well as they had in the past.”

Clemson also played most of its nonconference games without star forward PJ Hall fully healthy. Hall had two major surgeries this past offseason and only played about 20 minutes per game through the first month of the year.

That stretch is when bad losses to South Carolina and Loyola occured.

“PJ Hall was hurt a big part of the offseason and really was on minute restrictions the first month of the year, so that impacted some of our play in the nonconference,” Brownell said. “The nonconference scheduling piece is very challenging, because you’ve got to be able to try to get the games you can get.”