CLEMSON -- Let's take ourselves back exactly a year when no one was quite sure what to think about Clemson's NCAA Tournament appearance after an embarrassing ACC Tournament showing against Boston College.
And "no one was quite sure what to think" is probably being charitable.
Pessimism seemed to reign, as it often does in this world of over-the-top celebration or excoriation of the most recent result.
OK, you're back in that moment now. Let's say someone who somehow could see into the future excitedly told you what would happen over the next year:
Clemson is about to make a run to the Elite Eight and will lose PJ Hall and Joe Girard but hit it big with two transfer additions and win 18 of 20 games in the ACC and 27 games overall and Indiana will pursue Brad Brownell but Brownell will elect to remain at Clemson and everyone will be ecstatic.
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That's a mouthful.
And that's amazing.
We're here on the eve of Clemson's opening-round game against McNeese, and there's plenty of other stuff to write about and talk about.
The presence of Clemson alum Will Wade on the other side of the court brings enough juice by itself. And, really, the Wade subplot is kind of tied to this as well given not just how much Clemson fans have clamored for him during the rough patches, but also given how close Dan Radakovich once came to making a change.
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But for the moment let's bring ourselves back to just Brownell and Indiana.
Again, this feels weird when the dominant story should be surviving and advancing. You take nothing for granted in March, and we certainly aren't.
But folks, this is big. Big enough to, at least here in the moment, supersede everything else.
Brownell is from Indiana. He was heavily influenced by Bob Knight's half-court, motion style. When he arrived at Clemson the hope was that he'd engineer deeper runs into the NCAA Tournament after Oliver Purnell's full-court, pressing brand failed to produce a single NCAA victory. Brownell said at the time that postseason play was about "high-pressure, low-possession basketball" and that's straight from the Knight ethos.
Here's an excerpt from an interview with The Post and Courier conducted shortly after he took the job at 41 years old:
"But really there was Royce Waltman, my college coach (at DaPauw). And Jim Crews (at Evansville), who I worked under for a year, worked his camps, talked basketball with he and his staff. That is the Bob Knight tree I kind of came from; those guys' knowledge of the game is incredible. Jerry Wainwright (UNC-Wilmington) was really the guy I learned how to run a program from, dealing with the media, with boosters to learning how to organize recruiting, handling staff."
Brownell was also heavily influenced by his father, a high school coach in Evansville. He started keeping statistical charts for Bob Brownell at a young age and has said he's "the most honest man I know."
"He's the only guy I know who might say he had a seven on a hole in golf when he had a six," Brownell said in that same interview 15 years ago.
This probably explains why Brownell has none of the chair-throwing, player-tormenting baggage that tarnished Knight's legacy. Knight probably would've burned down the arena last Friday night in Charlotte if faced with the same indignities and incongruities that befell the Tigers against Louisville. Brownell is probably still livid about it, but he keeps that stuff mostly to himself while keeping everything classy and saying nice things about Jim Phillips publicly.
He's a gentleman. And Clemson fans probably wish he'd be a little more like Knight in sticking up for his team in the face of egregious no calls and no locker room availability.
Anyway, Brownell probably would've been perfect for Indiana. And he was very much near the top of the list.
We're told he was among their top two or three candidates. We don't know if they actually offered him and we don't know if he actually turned them down, but that's not the point.
The point is, he was seriously in the thing.
And he seriously wants to remain in this Clemson thing for a long time.
Wow.
Brownell and Clemson have been through a lot. It happens when you've been at a school this long, and particularly at a school that hasn't had much basketball success.
In 2017, there were calls for Radakovich to make a change after a 17-16 season that ended with a thud at home against Oakland in the first round of the NIT.
Wade had just completed his second season at VCU and had guided the Rams to back-to-back NCAA Tournaments.
Radakovich ended up sticking with Brownell, who'd gone six consecutive years without an NCAA appearance. Wade went to LSU.
You probably know the rest of the story. Clemson advanced to the Sweet 16 the next season and continued incremental progress that wasn't always visible but certainly is now in hindsight as progress on facilities, fused with an exceptional touch in the transfer portal, fused with excellent culture and player development, has produced a 74-29 record over the past three seasons.
After one NCAA appearance over nine seasons, Clemson now has three in the last five (and if you want to say it should be four of five we certainly won't argue).
Wade torpedoed his reputation while at LSU and is currently trying to rehab it at McNeese.
He'll get an opportunity at a bigger job, but it won't be Clemson.
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Clemson has shown patience to Brownell over the years, but the inverse is also true. The upcoming revenue share for basketball is going to be significantly below quite a lot of the schools Clemson competes against, so there's some stuff to work out there.
But we go back to what we said and repeated over the last several weeks in response to the idea that Brownell would crawl to Bloomington if given the opportunity.
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Maybe at some other points in his tenure here, yes.
But not now. And probably not ever.
He's not going back home because he already is home.
No, none of us could see this coming last March.
What a year. What a time.
