Excellent summary. Our problem in building basketball . . .

All-TigerNet [11934]

TigerPulse: 100%

Posts: 16363

Joined: 11/30/98

Okay ... here's your answer. It's long/complicated, but true!

Mar 2, 2016, 12:21 PM

Clemson started ignoring hoops way, way before any of us were born.

It didn't just happen all of a sudden, or even gradually over the past few years.

De-emphasizing basketball at Clemson was a conscious decision we made about the time Frank Howard became football coach and athletic director in 1940. Actually it may have been decided before that under Jess Neely, but subsequently Howard never made any secret of the fact that football was king at Clemson and what meager resources the school had at the time would be devoted to building the football program.

Fact: Clemson won the Southern Conference basketball title in 1939 and chose NOT to accept a bid to participate in the then prestigious NIT or the fledgling NCAA tournaments that year. Why? Because too many of the basketball players (specifically Banks McFadden) also played football and the tournament would run over into football practice.

Fact: After breaking away from the old Southern Conference and helping to form the ACC for mostly football-related reasons, Clemson lucked into one of the brightest basketball minds (according to no less of an authority than John Wooden) in the country when Press Maravich became head coach of the Tigers. Clemson had already dug a deep hole for themselves relative to the rest of the ACC, but this was the late 1950s and there was still time to recover and Press Maravich was a guy who could have done it ... if ... IF ... Frank Howard would have seen the wisdom of keeping him at Clemson. But instead we sent him on his way up to NC State over a reported $2,000 per year salary increase. Now $2K was not an insignificant sum back then, but if we were serious about hoops, we'd have found a way to pay it. We weren't and we didn't ... so we paid a bigger price down the road.

Fact: When SCar hired the great Frank McGuire and built Carolina Coliseum, we got the go ahead to build Littlejohn. But Littlejohn's original design was gutted over costs here and there and even though it was a step in the right direction at the time, the fact that it was built on the cheap further demonstrated our lack of commitment for basketball to any potential coach or prospective recruit who was paying attention. We also still had Press Maravich's assistant coach running our program. While SCar had made big plans and gone out and hired a giant in the basketball world, we just puttered along with a mediocre coach that fit our vision and budget.

Fact: With Frank Howard out of the picture, we hired a young and ambitious coach named Tates Locke and we gave him carte blanche to make Clemson a winner in the ACC, but we forgot to tell him to take it slow because we were already a well-established "also ran" in the eyes of the NCAA and suddenly recruiting a class of potential NBA caliber players raised suspicions that got us investigated and put on long term NCAA probation. North Carolina had already learned how to cheat without getting in trouble and there was no way that they (along with the rest of the ACC) were going to allow an upstart like Clemson to also cheat to make any sudden giant leap for the top of the conference ... just wasn't going to happen ... heck, they even succeeded in running off SCar and Frank McGuire when the gamecocks (wisely??) bolted the ACC for independent status.

Fact: Clemson is still to this very day, fighting an uphill battle that began at least in 1939 and with the same football-centric AD in command for 30 years, we pretty much cemented our basketball fate. Changing that scenario is sort of like turning a super tanker around mid-ocean. It takes a lot of time and patience and it needs a highly-talented and experienced captain and crew in command of the ship to make it happen.

Fact: Recently, whenever we seem to finally have that particular leadership in place, they take a look around, assess the situation, and make a mad dash for the lifeboats.

HTH ...

flag link

military_tech

thumb_down

thumb_up

into a consistent winner does start with this historical lack of emphasis. But those days were long ago, & since at least 1970 our lack of success in basketball has certainly not been for lack of trying. I've been going to Tiger basketball games since I was a kid, & I have no doubt that the fan support is there, & the administrative support too. The special challenge we face, in my opinion, is more than the matter of being "a football school in a basketball conference", as if we are forever fated to fail. Rather, it's the scale of the mountain we have to climb, competing as we do in a league which every year has multiple national-title contenders. Over time, this has created a perception of a glass ceiling, that no matter how much success a coach has at Clemson, we'll never get to the same level as Duke & North Carolina. Thus it has been that when we do land a good basketball coach, like Rick Barnes or Oliver Purnell, after a few years of middling success they've bolted for greener pastures.

For multiple reasons, it's never been easy to recruit top-notch basketball talent to Clemson. We're not a national brand that naturally "sells itself" to young talented players. Tates Locke lamented that it was difficult to sell urban black kids on a rural Southern outpost like Clemson when we weren't even able to provide them a decent cultural experience (though Clemson has changed so much for the better since those days). What is more, though we occasionally have NBA-caliber talent in South Carolina, we don't have a regional year-in-year-out well of talent (like greater Washington, D.C. or Philadelphia) that we can readily draw from to build a consistent winner.

So as always, it's going to take patience. I'm an optimist & still believe in Coach Brownell. We all know he can coach, but as always, in the end it comes down to recruiting. I know opinions about BB are mixed, but in him I see a coach who is happy to be at Clemson & who is willing to commit to us for the long-term. And that in itself constitutes an improvement over what we've been in the past. As fans we need to stay strong & continue to show up & support this team.

I see posts over and over about how Clemson does not have

image over substance...

If you really believe this, don't you find it even more

ACC teams have seven (7) NCAA titles in the past 15 years

easy apex... you should go slow for epi***

ACC - 5, SEC - 7 final four participants in

Re: ACC - 5, SEC - 7 final four participants in

SEC basketball---what a chuckle....take Kentucky out

Re: ACC - 5, SEC - 7 final four participants in

Hey Cocklover

Re: Hey Cocklover

Re: Hey Cocklover

Re: Hey Cocklover

Re: ACC teams have seven (7) NCAA titles in the past 15 years

Maryland won the NCAA while in the ACC***

Anybody got any answers to my initial question?

Okay ... here's your answer. It's long/complicated, but true!

Thanks for the detailed reply. Some of our problems make

You Are Correct - It Makes Absolutely

Outstanding post. Thank you for sharing that great historical info.***

You're welcome ...***

Somehow OP got it done

wonder why AD's in Div1 schools aren't rushing to hire

The offseason hasn't even started yet

does he want one? he's 62+ & has made a lot of money.

He doesn't look that old

nope...not for a second***

I don't really see how OP "got it done" so much more than BB

we got a runner up Trophy at the ACCT...I'm not sure the

I feel like I am blaspheming when I say this, but being a

Re: I feel like I am blaspheming when I say this, but being a

Re: I feel like I am blaspheming when I say this, but being a

You may have missed the point ...

Re: You may have missed the point ...

Win games, and the people will come

Right. But the point is that we won't win more

Re: I see posts over and over about how Clemson does not have

Fike was always jam-packed for sure ... of course there was

Yep, and if you were sitting on the first row

it's not true..with the right hc, we can be tourney regulars

The biggest reason that we are having a hard time is we

TigerBoard POTD