With less than three weeks left until Selection Sunday, Clemson’s men’s basketball season still has one major unanswered question: Will the Tigers be part of the NCAA Tournament?
Clemson missed out on another prime opportunity to boost its postseason resume Tuesday, dropping a 64-57 decision at Virginia. But at 21-9 overall with a 13-6 record in ACC play, the Tigers still sit in the top 4 of the league standings and squarely on the NCAA Tournament bubble.
“It’s a really hard deal,” Clemson coach Brad Brownell said following Tuesday’s game. “I certainly think we’re tournament worthy in terms of how we play, the nature of our team and all those kinds of things.”
As the calendar flips to March, The Clemson Insider is taking a closer look at the Tigers’ body of work with the end of the regular season looming.
The good
Clemson has performed relatively well against the best competition it’s faced, putting together a 7-5 combined record against the first two quadrants.
While Clemson has been nearly flawless in protecting its home floor (14-1 at Littlejohn Coliseum), perhaps the best thing the Tigers have going for them is they’ve proven they can beat quality teams off of it. Clemson has four Quad 1 victories with three of them coming on the road (at Pittsburgh, at Virginia Tech, at NC State), which could curry favor with the selection committee.
And when the Tigers have been good, they’ve been really good, particularly during the conference portion of their schedule. More than half of Clemson’s ACC wins have come by at least 13 points. Its eight double-digit wins in conference play are the most in the league. Only eight of the Tigers’ wins this season, or 38%, have come by single digits.
The bad
There are also enough perplexing results on the resume to make the selection committee scratch its collective head.
Four of Clemson’s losses have come against the bottom two quadrants. It’s tied for the most combined Quad 3 and Quad 4 losses of any team in the top 70 of the NET rankings. The Tigers’ two Quad 4 losses are tied with Texas A&M for the most among those teams.
One of those Quad 4 blemishes came by 18 points to Loyola Chicago back in December, and Clemson suffered one of the worst setbacks of any Power Six team last month when it lost by 10 to a Louisville team that had just three wins at the time. There was also that loss at South Carolina back in November, which was a Quad 4 loss until the Gamecocks recently improved their standing in the NET rankings enough to bump it up to a Quad 3 result.
A loss to a Boston College team outside the top 150 of the NET also doesn’t help the Tigers’ case.
The numbers
NET: 62
KenPom: 69
Sagarin: 51
Quad 1: 4-3
Quad 2: 3-2
Quad 3: 6-2
Quad 4: 8-2
The projections
What’s next?
Clemson will finish the regular season with a Quad 4 game against Notre Dame on Saturday at Littlejohn Coliseum. Then it’s on to the ACC Tournament, where the Tigers will try to further boost the resume.
Clemson could still be as low as the fifth seed in Greensboro, but a win over Notre Dame would lock up a top 4 seed, which would come with a double bye into next Thursday’s quarterfinals.
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