Commentary: Clemson has much to prove on big stage

CLEMSON | IT'S ONLY NATURAL the Clemson basketball team may be feeling pangs of apprehension heading into another NCAA tournament game.

The losses are four in a row and counting, stretching back to the 1996-97 season when the No. 4-seeded Tigers won games against lower-seeded Miami (Ohio) and Tulsa before dropping a double-overtime game to Minnesota.

The next season began an uncomfortable trend of first-round losses, three in a row to lower-seeded teams. The last two have come under coach Oliver Purnell, who saw his team blow a first-half lead in a loss to Villanova two years ago then last year the Tigers went go down ugly to Michigan.

The Michigan game included the ejection of long-range shooter Terrence Oglesby for a flagrant foul. He was last seen leaving the floor in a full-blown sulk; then after Purnell announced all starting positions other than Trevor Booker's were open to competition for this season, Oglesby quit school in hopes of playing abroad professionally.

So here they go again, this time off to Buffalo, N.Y., and an appointment Friday against Missouri, the one team in the 65-team field that plays the most like Clemson.

Perhaps the familiarity of approach - not to mention the improved mental state of this year's roster - will ease the burden the Tigers and their coach (he has a personal 0-5 NCAA tournament record) carry with these postseason disappointments.

At least they enter the tournament under the radar from a national perspective. The school's football team is trying to shed the image always discussed on national broadcasts of having as much talent as anybody while seizing up in big games.

In basketball, they barely even mention Clemson in the national pre-tournament broadcasts. When they do, they always note the four first-round losses, but nobody ever says Clemson is more talented than its opponents.

They don't even say that in the ACC, where the Tigers often face a size disadvantage up front that they seek to overcome with their pressuring defense and team rebounding.

At the end of the season, Clemson won five of seven in conference play, but it lost a big one on the last day of the season at Wake Forest that would have assured a bye in the first round of the ACC tournament. Then came a first-round defeat to N.C. State, which some observers thought played harder.

"I don't look at it that way," said assistant coach Ron Bradley. "I thought it was more a game of streaks, and they got the last one in on us. I can't look at it as they played harder than us."

Fair enough: He's a coach; he can't send that message. Purnell said Clemson played hard, "but I can't take anything away from N.C. State. They matched us; they played every bit as hard, or harder."

All of which makes you wonder if this team has a bit of stage fright. Knowing they are trying to build winning into a program that has had very little of it in more than a decade, can the big stage be too big? Too intimidating?

Do they allow themselves to fall into a psychologically timid state of mind?

"We can't do that," said guard Andre Young. "The whole thing of Clemson not having won for so many times is a burden that gets put on our shoulders, but this isn't the same team that was here last year or the last five years.

"We just have to go play the way we know how to play," he said. "That has to be our focus."

Will they slouch or stand up? Will they back off or get down? Will they receive or give?

The answers will come soon enough against Missouri.

How it ends, at this point, remains a mystery.