There’s no sugarcoating what happened inside the KFC Yum! Center Saturday night.
It was bad.
Really bad.
Granted, Louisville has been playing better lately. The Cardinals have now won two of their last four home games, and one of those two losses came by just one possession to ACC leader Virginia. Still, for a team like Clemson that’s trying to play its way onto the right side of the NCAA Tournament bubble, a win had to happen.
It didn’t.
A 10-point loss that was largely dominated in the second half by a four-win Louisville team continued a poorly timed spiral for Clemson, which has lost four of its last five games after a 10-1 start to ACC play. It also added to what’s been an odd season-long body of work.
The Tigers (19-8, 11-5 ACC) have a road win over Virginia Tech and a home win over Duke. They also have a win at Pittsburgh – a team tied for second in the league standings – a double-digit win over No. 23 NC State, a 20-point win over Wake Forest and a 40-point beatdown of Florida State, the largest margin of victory in any ACC game this season.
But the Tigers have some ugly blemishes to go with it.
Clemson began the season trying to dig out of a hole in that regard with a couple of Quad 4 losses in the non-conference to South Carolina and Loyola-Chicago, which beat the Tigers by 18 on a neutral court. After redeeming themselves early in the ACC slate (including those back-to-back Quad 1 wins at Virginia Tech and Pitt), Clemson suffered a Quad 3 blow at Boston College late last month. That came a few nights after Chase Hunter’s last-second heroics at FSU in the teams’ first meeting kept things from getting worse in the bad-loss department.
That was until Saturday when Clemson laid an egg.
Brad Brownell and his team don’t like to make excuses, but they had a built-in one in road losses to Wake Forest and Boston College in that the Tigers weren’t operating at full strength. Hunter and fellow guard Alex Hemenway missed the Wake Forest game, and then Brevin Galloway wasn’t available for the Boston College loss.
But with the gang back together now, the only thing Clemson could blame for what happened Saturday is defense that suddenly isn’t traveling. While the offense wasn’t exactly prolific, particularly from 3-point range (4 of 24), it was good enough to produce 73 points on the road. PJ Hall led the way with 26 of them while Hunter, Galloway and Hunter Tyson also scored in double figures.
But for the second straight weekend away from home, Clemson couldn’t buy a stop. Louisville, a team shooting 41% on the season, shot close to 60% from the field for a majority of the game before ending up at 51%. The Cardinals scored 83 points on a night when they only made five 3s.
That defensive performance came exactly one week after North Carolina put up 91 points in a 20-point win in Chapel Hill, Clemson’s worst margin of defeat all season.
“I think the athleticism bothered us at times,” Brownell said following Saturday’s game. “I thought they got by us a couple of times on some plays. … Our fouling was problematic. So we gave them some free throws, and then they just got by us a little bit.”
Saturday’s result was the worst of Clemson’s three Quad 4 setbacks. Louisville, which had just one win over a Power Six opponent before Saturday, began the weekend at 324 in the NET rankings. Only 363 Division I teams play men’s college basketball.
A bit of good news for Clemson: Duke’s double-digit win at Syracuse moved the Blue Devils back into the top 30 of the NET, making that a Quad 1 win again for the Tigers. Still, that only gives Clemson as many Quad 1 wins as Quad 4 losses, and no team with a NET lower than 77 has made the NCAA Tournament as an at-large since the NET’s inception in 2018. Clemson’s NET after Saturday’s disaster sits at 80.
There’s still time to make amends if you’re Clemson, but the margin for error is gone. Clemson has four regular-season games left, including a pair of Quad 1 opportunities at NC State and Virginia, and the Tigers almost certainly need to win them all to have a realistic chance to hear their name called come Selection Sunday.
If it can’t do that, Clemson will need to pull off some magic in Greensboro at the ACC Tournament next month. Otherwise, the Tigers will be left to look back at a forgettable night in Louisville as the death knell to a once-promising season.
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