Clemson Tigers vs Florida State Seminoles Basketball Recap

Clemson 62, Florida State 44

The Atlantic Coast Conference has always been known as a basketball-rich and football-poor league. In this particular college sports cycle, the ACC is unable to count on roundball to make up for its pigskin deficiencies.

Indeed, the most damning aspect of this past Saturday afternoon was the fact that the Florida State Seminoles owned second place in the ACC. When a second-place team performs the way FSU did at Littlejohn Coliseum in Clemson, South Carolina, it’s realistic to wonder if the ACC will be anything more than a two-team league come Selection Sunday. Yes, things are that bad in the conference that has long been considered the crown jewel in all of college basketball.

The ACC owns a proud basketball heritage. It began the conference tournament in 1953, creating the signature postseason event that has spiced up the first half of March for decades. The ACC boasts Duke and North Carolina, two blueblood programs who have stood atop the sport for decades while creating the best basketball players the planet has ever known. Michael Jordan came through the ACC. Tim Duncan came through the ACC. The Carolinas, alongside Indiana, Kentucky and Kansas, form the heartbeat of major college hoops, but this year, the ACC – with the sole exception of 19-2 Duke – is languishing behind the rest of America. There’s no better example of that reality than the second-place-turned-third-place Florida State Seminoles.

Coach Leonard Hamilton’s team served up an all-time stinker in an early-afternoon encounter with the Clemson Tigers, a stark indicator of the dearth of quality on display in the ACC this year. The one team in the league to beat Duke has been hard to watch at times this season, never more so than on the final weekend of January.

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Just how awful and unwatchable was this game? Florida State scored six points in the game’s first eight and a half minutes… and that was hardly FSU’s worst stretch of the day. The Seminoles began the second half by scoring just two points in the first seven and a half minutes. Florida State didn’t produce one double-figure scorer, and the Noles – who posted just 18 points in the first half – were sitting at 24 with 10:30 left in regulation. They scrambled to top 40 points, but since the game was out of reach by then, it’s hard to give FSU much credit for mustering even that much point production. FSU hit just 16 shots on Saturday while committing 21 turnovers.

But that’s not all.

Clemson was hardly on fire in this contest. Coach Brad Brownell’s bunch did not hit a single field goal in the final 12:31 of the first half, missing 15 straight shots. Yet, Florida State hit only three field goals in that same time span, so the Tigers owned a nine-point (27-18) lead at the intermission. That’s one sign of how bad this game was in both directions. Clemson committed 17 turnovers and made only 19 baskets, meaning that the Tigers were less horrible than FSU, as opposed to being more excellent. Yet, credit must be due to Clemson for shutting down Florida State; the Noles were 5-1 in the ACC when the day began, so this is an encouraging step forward for a CU program that lost its coach, Oliver Purnell, in the offseason. Brownell is being forced to start from scratch, and this win will aid his rebuilding efforts.

One just wishes it didn’t have to scar the eyesight or the memories of the fans who had to put up with this sorry spectacle in the state of South Carolina.

By: Matt Zemek
DFN Sports Senior Staff Writer