Brownell makes final NCAA Tournament appeal on ESPN

Brad Brownell says his team passes the eye test.

by Brandon Rink - Staff Writer - Sun Mar 12 11:57:43 GMT-04:00 2023

Clemson men’s basketball coach Brad Brownell made his final appeal for NCAA Tournament inclusion on an ESPN college basketball preview show on Sunday afternoon.

His team takes a 23-10 record into the final call from the Men’s NCAA Tournament committee on Sunday (6 p.m./CBS) after notching a NET Quadrant 1 win on Thursday over NC State by 26 and falling by 20 in another Net Q1 opportunity against Virginia Friday.

“Eye test. I think watching our team play. I mean Hunter Tyson and PJ Hall voted as two of the top-12-13 players in the ACC,” Brownell said. “We have the second-best defense (in the ACC), the fifth-best offense (in the ACC) and won 14 ACC games. I just think if you watch our team play and seen us throughout the year, we look like one of the top teams in the country to be in this tournament. We’re obviously 7-6 against Quad 1 and 2s – that’s not as many as some other leagues in the high-major (leagues) but very few people have a winning record in their Quad 1 and 2 games.

“And 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 the Quad 1 wins are at home. We didn’t get many Quad 1 home games. I think we have proven we can win away from home.”

ESPN’s Joe Lunardi has Clemson as the second team left out of the NCAA Tournament field, while including conference foes NC State and Pitt in the “Last Four In.” The Tigers went 4-0 against those opponents, with three of the wins away from Littlejohn Coliseum.

“We’re also on the bubble with some teams we’ve had a lot of success against,” he said. “A couple teams in our league and even Penn State who we happened to play in non-conference…So we’ve done a lot against a lot of teams that are like ourselves.”

A major ding to Clemson’s tournament resume is a 334th-ranked non-conference strength of schedule, out of 363 Division I teams, losing two teams on the lower end of the NET Quadrant rankings there as well (South Carolina and Loyola-Chicago).

“The non-conference is really hard to control. We tried to schedule up,” said Brownell. “You can’t control who you get sometimes. We lost a game to Iowa last-second and we get a game against Cal and unfortunately Cal’s having a terrible season. You just don’t know those things. Richmond, Loyola-Chicago, we schedule those games away from home – we really didn’t schedule many home games and tried to schedule up a little bit but some of the teams we played didn’t fare as well as they have in the past. So that part of it is really challenging.

“PJ Hall was obviously hurt for a big part of the offseason and really was on minute-restrictions for the first month of the year so that really impacted our play in the non-conference but the non-conference scheduling piece is very challenging because you have to get the games you can get.”

Brownell has advocates on the ESPN set for NCAA tourney inclusion.

“As to the other teams they’re in the pool with and trying to get in the field, I would put Clemson in before some of the others,” ESPN lead analyst Jay Bilas said. “The eye test has to be part of it. You can’t just go off of paper, but the paper can’t be eliminated completely. It’s a balancing. This has become really formulaic. The committee’s job is real formulaic. They say the same things every thing and all that, and individually someone may say I don’t like strength of record, I don’t like this NET, I don’t like this – I don’t like that. Whatever is the disaqualifying factor. But when you start talking about non-conference (ratings), who cares?

“Everybody says ‘total body of work’ and then want to say, ‘Wait a minute, non-conference (strength).’ If my total body of work is good, why do you when I played it and who I played?...If Clemson or NC State or Pittsburgh or one or two of them don’t get in, the whole league is going to go through a debrief and change the way they do things. That’s what other leagues have done and that’s what the ACC will do if one of them gets dinged. Because you can’t have this trend go on. If that happens, this will be two years in a row it’s happened to the ACC and they won’t let it happen a third.”

Clemson NCAA Tournament profile

Record: 23-10

KPI: 52

SOR (Strength of record): 54

BPI: 52

KenPom: 64

Sagarin: 51

NET: 60

Record vs. NET Q1: 4-4 (win over No. 16 Duke at home, No. 45 NC State away and neutral site, No. 67 Pitt on the road)

Q4 losses: 2 (in neutral site game with No. 267 Loyola-Chicago and on the road at No. 315 Louisville)

NET SOS: 102

NON-CON SOS: 334