Clemson basketball loss to Virginia pushes Tigers farther from NCAA Tournament with UNC next
CLEMSON – The burden of proof rests squarely on the shoulders of Clemson basketball and coach Brad Brownell heading into the season’s home stretch.
The team’s latest gut punch came Saturday afternoon in a 66-65 loss to Virginia in a key ACC game that could prove pivotal to their respective fates.
The loss was Clemson’s fourth by three points or less this season and was the Tigers’ second ACC defeat by a single point.
Perhaps we should have known when Virginia’s Jacob Groves drilled a 3-pointer with one second left in the first half to put the Tigers in an eight-point hole; it wasn’t a good omen.
The last time Clemson overcame a halftime deficit to defeat Virginia? Try January 18, 2003. That was three Clemson basketball coaches and 32 games against Virginia ago.
Despite that, Clemson showed plenty of mettle by battling back to take the lead – albeit for a little more than a minute – at 57-56 with 5:37 left in the game. But a four-point play by the Cavaliers’ Isaac McKneely with 2:11 left was a dagger, as was a tip-in by Ryan Dunn with 40 seconds left.
The result? Clemson is left clinging to one of the lower rungs of the ACC standings, looking for reprieve after an 11-1 start to a season that was expected to result in a March Madness ticket.
After missing out on the NCAA Tournament last season despite 22 regular-season victories, a third-place ACC finish and 14-6 league record, this year’s team knows that nothing is a given.
Last season, Clemson’s weak nonconference schedule and a few “bad” losses against decidedly weaker teams were cited as primary reasons for the Tigers’ exclusion. Brownell addressed those concerns in the offseason by adding more tournament-worthy teams to the schedule, with positive results. Clemson’s NET ranking, which stood at 33 entering Saturday’s game, has been buoyed by early season victories against teams such as Alabama, Boise State, TCU and South Carolina and a two-point road loss at Memphis.
The hope now is that those early wins provided enough equity to compensate for Clemson’s less-than-stellar showing in ACC play.
As it stands at the halfway point of the ACC season, the Tigers are sub-.500 at 4-6 and are in a precarious position as far as ACC Tournament seeding.
With the bulk of its talent returning, Clemson was picked to finish fifth in the ACC’s preseason poll; as of Saturday afternoon the Tigers were in 11th place and in danger of slipping into 12th depending on the outcome of other games.
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That is somewhat of an anomaly given that nine times in the previous 13 seasons Brownell’s teams have finished higher than projected in the league’s preseason poll. For that to be the case for a 10th time, the Tigers will need to muster an impressive finish.
The road gets no easier from here. Clemson is at first-place North Carolina on Tuesday, then travels to Syracuse, where the Tigers have won just once in six tries under Brownell.
Granted, it seems that Clemson has had the misfortune of playing teams at the most inopportune of times. Last week the Tigers ran into a Duke team that had won eight of nine games coming in; Duke won by a point.
On Saturday, they welcomed a Virginia team riding a five-game winning streak. Er, make that six.
One was left to wonder if, like ships passing in the night, Clemson and Virginia are bound for different destinations. If the Tigers are unable to pull off a few upsets over the final 10 games, that could indeed be the case.
Scott Keepfer covers Clemson athletics for The Greenville News and the USA TODAY Network. Email him at skeepfer@gannett.com and follow him on X, formerly known as Twitter, @ScottKeepfer
This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Clemson basketball: March Madness hopes take hit in Virginia loss
