How Clemson basketball and Brad Brownell became the ACC’s surprise No. 1 team

PJ Hall won’t lie: the chant hurt. He heard it almost a year ago, walking off the court with his teammates after another loss, but remembers it like it was yesterday.

“Let’s go Duke!”

“Let’s go Duke!”

After an 18-point home loss to the Blue Devils in February 2022, it was a clear reminder of where Clemson stood in relation to Duke on the ACC men’s basketball food chain. One program was at the top. One was not.

Oh, how things change.

Eleven months after leaving Littlejohn Coliseum bruised and battered, amid a disappointing season that put Clemson coach Brad Brownell on the hot seat, Hall was once again thinking about the chant. But this time it was with joy.

And hindsight.

And a smirk.

Pouring in a season-high 26 points in front of a raucous crowd to help topple a ranked Duke team, 72-64, and extend Clemson’s best start in 70 years of ACC play will do that to you.

“We got our tails handed to us last year,” Hall said last Saturday. “We were down a guy and fighting to play every game with injuries. We got kinda beat into the dirt a little bit and got, in our own arena, (people) chanting, ‘Let’s go Duke.’ So it felt pretty good to have this place packed out and kinda shove it back in their face.”

It was the perfect contrast: where Clemson was, where Clemson is.

And, as Brownell would point out, where Clemson still wants to go.

Picked to finish 11th among 15 teams in the ACC’s preseason poll, the Tigers have exceeded expectations and then some, rising above UNC, Duke, Virginia and a host of contenders to seize the No. 1 spot in the conference standings near the midpoint of the 2022-23 season.

As of Wednesday, Clemson is 15-4 overall, first in the ACC at 7-1 with a one-game lead over Miami and Wake Forest, 10-0 at home and ranked No. 19 in The AP Top 25.

The Tigers came back down to earth a little bit Tuesday night, losing by 10 points at Wake Forest to snap a program-record 11-game ACC winning streak dating back to last season, but that’s only an asterisk within their season.

Consider:

The Tigers started off 7-0 in the ACC. That’s their best ever start in 70 years of league play, dating back to 1953. Clemson hadn’t even reached 5-0 since 1996-97.

Clemson also debuted at No. 19 in The AP poll, marking its first appearance since Jan. 18, 2021 (No. 20) and only its fifth total appearance since 2019-20.

And with 12 more ACC games to go, the Tigers are already on the verge of breaking their single-season ACC wins record (11 in 2017-18). In a league where UNC, Duke and Virginia have won 11 of of the past 13 ACC regular-season championships, that would put Clemson in serious position to claim its second ever and first since 1990.

A public challenge

Those are all early signs of a team built to play (and perhaps hang around) in March … which hasn’t happened a lot under Brownell. Entering this season, his 13th at the helm, the veteran coach by way of UNC-Wilmington and Wright State had led Clemson to three NCAA Tournaments in 12 years.

That lack of Big Dance consistency stands out like a sore thumb on a résumé that, as Brownell has correctly pointed out, isn’t exactly lacking.

Clemson has the sixth most wins in the ACC since 2017-18, and Brownell, 54, is the winningest coach in program history, responsible for four of its seven all-time double-digit ACC win seasons and one of its four all-time Sweet 16 runs during a memorable 2017-18 that remains the high mark of his tenure

But he spoke openly about his disappointment in the last season, in which the Tigers finished 10th in the ACC and missed the postseason altogether. So did new director of athletics Graham Neff, who wrote in an open letter to season-ticket holders last March that Clemson men’s basketball “did not meet our expectations” in 2021-22.

“There were a number of reasons for the results, but we realize this is a bottom-line game,” Neff wrote, and he issued the program a challenge:

Return to the NCAA Tournament. Next year.

Brownell — who got his last contract extension through 2025-26 from former Clemson AD Dan Radakovich — has taken that public challenge on the chin. And, in what’s becoming a rarity for college basketball coaches who need to win now, Brownell’s done it in homegrown fashion.

“I’ve said it a lot of times: There’s a lot of teams out there with the guys wearing the same jersey, but there’s not a lot of true teams … and with everything going on, it’s probably even more challenging for coaches to create that atmosphere,” he said.

“I’m just blessed, this year, to be coaching a group of kids that allow you to coach them and care about each other and have one goal in mind. And that’s to do their best for Clemson.”

Despite losing two starting guards to the transfer portal last cycle, the Tigers’ 2022-23 basketball roster features 11 high school recruits and just one transfer — and even Brevin Galloway, a graduate guard who came in from Boston College, grew up in nearby Anderson and started his career at the College of Charleston.

In other words: Clemson’s resurgence has essentially been led by Clemson guys, some of them former reserves who have steadily improved year after year — crockpot guys, to borrow a favorite analogy of football coach Dabo Swinney.

Graduate forward Hunter Tyson leads the team at 15.8 points per game and is second in the ACC with 10 double-doubles. Junior guard Chase Hunter has boosted his average from 6.7 points to 14.0 points per game, the fifth largest jump in the conference. And Hall, a junior center, has overcome a summer knee injury to average 13.7 points per game and shoot 52% from the field.

Galloway — who was the hero against Duke with a season-high seven points and two key late buckets — also starts and averages 10.8 points, while senior guard Alex Hemenway is averaging 9.8 points per game and is shooting 50% on 3-pointers.

Amid Hall’s offseason rehab and Hemenway’s midseason (he hasn’t played an ACC game yet due to a foot injury), backup forwards Ian Schieffelin and Ben Middlebrooks have also emerged. And don’t forget young guns Josh Beadle, Chauncey Wiggins and R.J. Godfrey, all of whom are developing freshmen.

“When I got here, I was like, ‘Dang, bro. I love every single one of these guys,’ ” Galloway said. “It was, like, the second week. We were brothers from Day 1. That’s helped us out along the way.”

The winning formula

Clemson’s built a reputation this season as a smart, veteran team. Though they’re top 5 in the flashy categories such as scoring offense and 3-point shooting, the Tigers are also No. 1 in the ACC in free-throw percentage (they shoot 79.5%), No. 1 in team field-goal percentage defense (opponents shoot 39.8%) and No. 3 in team-wide assist-to-turnover ratio (1.37).

They also have a knack for mid-game adjustments. Last Saturday’s Duke game marked the fifth time this season and the fourth time in ACC play that Clemson has won a game after trailing at halftime, something Hall describes as a “testament to our coaching staff.”

Clemson also has a strong NCAA Tournament argument to date with a 4-2 record in Quadrant 1 games, a 2-0 record in Quadrant 2 games and current No. 8 seed projections in the latest round of bracketology by ESPN and CBS Sports experts.

As for lingering concerns? Clemson does have puzzling nonconference Quadrant 4 losses to rival South Carolina and Loyola Chicago, two teams bound for the bottom of their conference standings that still beat the Tigers in November and December.

Analytics also don’t love Clemson. The NCAA’s often-critiqued NET rankings deem the Tigers the 58th best team in the country behind seven other teams in the conference, including four (N.C. State, Duke, Virginia Tech and Pittsburgh) they’ve beaten head to head.

The well-regarded website KenPom.com, meanwhile, has Clemson at No. 59 behind six other ACC teams in its power rankings thanks mostly to a middling strength of opponents (No. 117 among 363 Division I teams).

That heats up in February as Clemson hosts No. 17 Miami and also visits preseason No. 1 UNC (59-1 against the Tigers in Chapel Hill), No. 10 Virginia and N.C. State.

One also can’t overlook the day-to-day challenges in the ACC, which Brownell routinely touts as one of the best leagues in the country — and the perfect way to keep his team locked in amid a record-breaking start full of comebacks, extinguished hot seats and chants (the good kind).

“I said before the Duke game that win or lose we’re gonna have a really hard game at Wake Forest,” Brownell said Tuesday. “Now we’re gonna have a really hard game at home on Saturday against Virginia Tech … we have a day off, which is probably needed, and then we better get ourselves prepared and ready for battle.”

Next 5 Clemson men’s basketball games

• Saturday, Jan. 21: vs. Virginia Tech, 6 p.m. (ESPN2)

• Tuesday, Jan. 24: vs. Georgia Tech, 9 p.m. (ACCN)

• Saturday, Jan. 28: at Florida State, 5 p.m. (ACCN)

• Tuesday, Jan. 31: at Boston College, 7 p.m. (ACCN)

• Saturday, Feb. 4: vs. No. 17 Miami, 3 p.m. (ACCN)