Brad Brownell addresses future of scheduling rivalry with South Carolina

Brad Brownell and the Clemson Tigers secured a victory over the South Carolina to remain undefeated on the season on Wednesday.

Following the 72-67 victory over the Gamecocks, Brownell shared some thoughts on the future of the rivalry between Clemson and South Carolina, explaining that he’d love to see the matchup continue into the future.

“We’ve talked about it. It’s hard. There’s just so many factors,” Brownell explained. “The multi-team events are a big factor. Obviously we have the ACC/SEC Challenge, which we’re both a part of now. I do think this is a good time, when there’s students. For us, there were students when we played over there last year. Early in the year when football’s going on, I don’t love that. We’ve done it some. I don’t think it’s good. I think it’s hard.

“With finals, there’s only about a — it’s a small window. Honestly, we kind of got jammed in. We’ve got Pitt on — we don’t schedule that game and they put it on Sunday. We’ve got turn around on Wednesday and play South Carolina now. Saturday, we’re trying to play a neutral court game against a good team. We’ve got to fly to Toronto tomorrow at two o’clock. Oh, by the way, we’ve got to go to class, right? So there’s a lot going on. It just makes it really hard. There’s only a few dates that it can really work. But this was a good one this year.”

Moreover, Clemson got off to a very slow start inside Littlejohn Coliseum against the Gamecocks. They were down by eight right off the bat and by seven at halftime after going scoreless over the final seven-plus minutes. That slump continued over the first five minutes of the second half where the Gamecocks were able to earn their largest margin.

Then, over the final 15 minutes, the Tigers found their stride as they scored over half their points with 39. They also held South Carolina to just 23 the rest of the way as they turned a deficit into a back and forth game that eventually went in their favor.

It took a minute for Clemson to find their footing in this matchup. Still, as it progressed, Brownell says they established themselves and did enough to stay undefeated in the end.

“We were better I thought. We did a pretty good job,” said Brownell. “They do a lot of different things. They have small lineups, they have big lineups, they post you, they post guards, they can shoot with their bigs. We only had a couple of days to really kind of get adjusted to it all. It was a lot for our guys to have to tackle.”

“I thought we just hung in there and did a better job the longer the game went,” Brownell said. “We kind of just talked about that. We’re going to have to really play well defensively because they’re a good defensive team. It’s hard to score against them.”

Regardless, Clemson is undefeated, and they’ll hope to use the momentum gained from Wednesday’s game to keep their winning ways going.

On3’s Sam Gillenwater contributed to this article.