Longest Modern Clemson Winning Streaks in ACC Play

When Duke travels to Clemson on Wednesday – oops, to Greenville, S.C., to play Clemson – it will face one of the hotter teams in the ACC.

The Tigers opened their conference season at Chapel Hill, where they are apparently ordained to always lose. Certainly they fulfilled that destiny this year; they fought hard and hung around but never really threatened.

The visit to North Carolina turned out to be a warmup for better things. Clemson next hosted Florida State, and won decisively. It journeyed to Syracuse and triumphed in overtime. Then Brad Brownell’s team got a visit from 16th-ranked Louisville, which had just handled N.C. State at Raleigh, its eighth win in nine games.

The Cardinals, still fitting into the ACC, trailed by double digits in the late going against the Tigers. They cut the margin to a basket in the final seconds, only to fall short. The Louisville program, and the school, have bigger problems to deal with, but that’s a story for another time.

Clemson is spending the year with the Bon Secours Wellness Arena in Greenville serving as its home away from home. "The Well," as it’s called, also hosts a minor league hockey team, the Swamp Rabbits.

The building can accommodate 14,897 fans for basketball, but diluting the home court advantage, the Tigers attract about half that many. The Louisville game supposedly had 9,562 on hand, although it was reported as a "sparse crowd" in one South Carolina newspaper. Noting a 28 free throw disparity (the Cards fouled generously to catch up), UL coach Rick Pitino mentioned with apparent sarcasm "this raucous crowd that was here."

Clemson’s three straight wins in league play are not that unusual for the program, but were surpassed only twice by the Tigers over the past quarter century. Those runs came in 1997 and last season when they captured four in a row.

Since 1990, when a Cliff Ellis squad that finished first in the ACC won six straight league games, plus a nonconference meeting with Furman, there were also 11 times the Tigers won three straight conference contests. Those came under Brownell in 2014 and 2012; every season from 2005 through 2010 under Oliver Purnell; in 2003, the last of Larry Shyatt’s five seasons; in 1998, the last of Rick Barnes’ four seasons; and in 1993 under Ellis.

Should Clemson win against Duke, it would match the longer 2015 and 1997 streaks. To equal Ellis’ surprise six-victory run of 1990, the Tigers would then have to down 13-2 Miami at home this coming Saturday and beat Virginia at Charlottesville.