Clemson shut out of NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament

Clemson's last chance to impress came Friday, a 76-56 loss to Virginia in the ACC Tournament semifinals (Merrell Mann photo).

by Brandon Rink - Staff Writer - Sun Mar 12 17:35:18 GMT-04:00 2023

The Clemson men’s basketball team was not included in the NCAA Tournament field announced on Sunday evening.

According to the committee, Mississippi State, Pitt, Arizona State and Nevada were the last four teams in the NCAA Tournament field, while Clemson was regarded as the fourth team among the last four out with Oklahoma State, Rutgers and North Carolina. NC State was also included in the field as an 11-seed.

After going 14-6 in the conference season, this is the first time an ACC team with a .700 conference winning percentage or better has not received an at-large bid since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985. The 14 conference wins set a school record for a single season.

At 23-10 overall, Brad Brownell’s Tigers will host Ohio Valley Conference regular-season champion Morehead State as a 1-seed in the National Invitational Tournament on Wednesday (7 p.m./ESPN+).

Brownell made his final NCAA Tournament appeal earlier in the day on ESPN.

“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.”

A point of contention on Clemson’s tournament resume was a 334th-ranked non-conference strength of schedule going into Sunday, out of 363 Division I teams, and losing two teams on the lower end of the NET Quadrant rankings there as well (South Carolina and Loyola-Chicago). Brownell said his team didn’t catch some breaks on the non-conference slate.

“The non-conference is really hard to control. We tried to schedule up,” Brownell told ESPN Sunday afternoon. “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.”

ESPN analysts Alphonso Ellis, Seth Greenberg, Jay Bilas and Dick Vitale all agreed on their post-announcement analysis show that Clemson should have been in the field.

"I don't understand the logic there," Vitale said. "They won 23 games -- yeah, they had a couple of bad losses but I don't know you can really justify that. That really troubles me."

Clemson rated 60th in the NET going into Sunday and averaged top-60 marks in both results-based (53) and predictive-based (56) metrics used by the NCAA committee.

ESPN bracketologist Joe Lunardi had Clemson as his second team out of his final projected field going into the selection show.

The Tigers last made the NCAA Tournament field in the 2020-21 season and last advanced out of the first round in the 2017-18 campaign, making the Sweet 16.