Bubble trouble? Clemson’s NCAA tournament chances drop after losing streak
Clemson men’s basketball was flying high early in conference play. But after a resounding loss Saturday at North Carolina, the Tigers found themselves in a familiar position.
On the bubble.
After losing 91-71 in Chapel Hill, Clemson (18-7, 10-4 ACC) has not only ceded its position as the No. 1 team in the ACC standings but dropped to the “Last Four In” in ESPN bracketologist Joe Lunardi’s latest projection of the 68-team NCAA tournament field.
Sunday’s update from BracketMatrix.com, which tracks and averages out dozens of bracket projections in real time, also has Clemson as a No. 11 seed, which is essentially the cut-off line for power conference teams before the NCAA starts seeding the smaller, automatic qualifiers as No. 12-16 seeds.
That indicates a daunting path forward — with little room for error across six remaining regular-season games and a premium on ACC tournament play — if Clemson wants to avoid spending a second consecutive March Madness on the couch.
Clemson’s 20-point loss to UNC on Feb. 11 was its season-high third in a row after a program record 10-1 start in ACC play, which included gutsy wins over N.C. State, Duke and Pittsburgh.
The Tigers also lost 62-54 at Boston College on Jan. 31 and 78-74 at home to Miami on Feb. 4 — booting them out of the AP Top 25 after a three-week streak of appearances. Clemson, which ranked as high as No. 19 on Jan. 16, didn’t get a single vote in Monday’s updated poll.
“We’re not going to overreact,” Brownell said Saturday. “We’ve played a lot of good basketball. Very few teams don’t have a bad week. We’ve had a little bit of a bad week. … We’re fine. I know we’ve had a bad week, and we don’t want to. There’s still probably 12 or 13 teams in the league that would probably love to change places with us.”
Here’s what else you need to know about the Tigers’ tournament hopes as they prepare for Wednesday’s home game against Florida State at Littlejohn Coliseum.
Clemson’s remaining schedule
There’s a reason Lunardi, ESPN’s longtime bracket expert, deemed Clemson-UNC the “most impactful game of the day.” It was, essentially, a bubble battle for two teams running out of opponents who move the needle résumé-wise.
Consider the conference records, NET rankings and KenPom.com rankings of these four teams that comprise two thirds of Clemson’s remaining regular-season schedule:
Florida State: 6-9 ACC, No. 212 NET, No. 189 KenPom
Louisville: 1-13 ACC, No. 331 NET, No. 296 KenPom
Syracuse: 8-6 ACC, No. 98 NET, No. 88 KenPom
Notre Dame: 2-12 ACC, No. 201 NET, No. 185 KenPom
FSU, Louisville and Notre Dame are current Quadrant 4 teams in the NCAA’s NET metric; Syracuse, like Clemson, is in Quadrant 3.
Not that Clemson can control its conference schedule, but that’s far from an earth-shattering stretch for a team that could benefit from a sexy win or two.
Enter No. 7 Virginia and No. 23 N.C. State, the No. 1 and No. 5 teams in the ACC standings. Clemson plays them in consecutive road games later this month — traveling to Raleigh on Feb. 25 and Charlottesville on Feb. 28 — in what could very well be its biggest two-game stretch of the year.
Still, it’s an unenviable situation. Clemson has four games that present little to gain and lots to lose (three of them at home) and two road dates looking like more and more of an uphill climb.
Down year for the ACC
Something else Clemson can’t control: It’s a bad year for the ACC at large. Even though the conference should end up with its fair share of NCAA tournament teams — seven, at Lunardi’s latest count — its struggles have been well-documented.
Notre Dame, Georgia Tech and Louisville are a combined 5-38 in conference play; reigning ACC champion Virginia Tech and generally steady Florida State are below .500; and Boise State (one) had more AP votes this week than blue bloods UNC and Duke combined (zero).
Even with Virginia still being Virginia, and with Pittsburgh, No. 15 Miami and N.C. State turning heads, this is far from the Billy Packer-narrated Raycom Sports era of men’s hoops glory.
Stats are fluid and fickle, but the ACC’s 15 member schools have an average NET ranking of No. 110.87 (out of 363 Division I teams) as of Monday. That’s No. 7 nationally, well behind the Big 12, Big Ten, SEC and Big East and more in the Mountain West and Pac-12 range.
Welcome to the one season where setting a school record for ACC wins (Clemson’s at 10, one short of its 2017-18 program record) might not be enough.
Magic in Greensboro?
Which leads the Tigers — currently No. 77 in the NET rankings and No. 79 in the KenPom rankings — to Greensboro for the 2023 conference tournament.
No matter how Clemson fares over its last six games — 5-1, 3-3, 2-4 — that second weekend of March can make it all better. Conference tournament runs matter: not just for the Saturday league champion auto-qualifier but for the Thursday quarterfinalists and Friday semifinalists.
The Tigers still have the ACC’s second best team-wide 3-point shooting mark (37.2%), and they boast an experienced lineup that has hung with the best of them. Rolling out Brevin Galloway and Chase Hunter at guard and Hunter Tyson and PJ Hall at forward isn’t a bad starting point.
But Brownell’s Clemson teams are 6-11 all-time in ACC tournament play, and although the Tigers have been close many times — see UNC in 2011, Duke in 2014 and 2017, Virginia in 2018 and Virginia Tech last spring — they haven’t won two games at the conference tournament since 2007-08.
It’s not quite “automatic qualifier or bust,” but it’s trending that way for Clemson, which has also never won an ACC tournament championship. The Tigers are 2-3 in Quad 1 games, 5-1 in Quad 2, 4-1 in Quad 3 and a troublesome 7-2 in Quad 4 (take a bow, South Carolina).
In other words: the next six games — and especially the N.C. State and Virginia games, which are Quad 1 opportunities — could go a long way in making Clemson’s magic number of Greensboro wins that much easier (or that much tougher) to swallow.
Clemson basketball next 6 games
- Wednesday: vs. Florida State, 7 p.m. (RSN)
- Saturday: at Louisville, 7 p.m. (ACCN)
- Feb. 22: vs. Syracuse, 7 p.m. (ACCN)
- Feb. 25: at NC State, noon (RSN)
- Feb. 28: at Virginia, 7 p.m. (ACCN)
- March 4: vs. Notre Dame, 8 p.m. (ACCN)
This story was originally published February 13, 2023 at 2:55 PM.
