CLEMSON -- Brad Brownell's head hit the pillow this morning at about 2:45.
He was back up before 6, and not by choice.
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"I woke up at 5:50 or something. Couldn't really sleep. And then I started getting a bunch of texts early, too. So then I started watching a little bit of the game."
A few hours later, Brownell was in the middle of his morning walk around Littlejohn Coliseum when he spoke with Tigerillustrated.com about the victory.
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The scoreboard alone -- Clemson 70, No. 4 Kentucky 66 -- paints an impressive enough picture by itself.
But this goes so much deeper.
If you saw it, you know what was behind it and we don't even really need to explain it or describe it to you.
Seth Greenberg went through wars against Brownell while coaching Virginia Tech. Now he's analyzing the game for ESPN, and these words from him last night get to the heart of it:
"Brad has built a program on toughness, resilience, player development and character."
Those pillars aren't new; the "Clemson Grit" thing has been around for a while, and Clemson fans have become well acquainted with it in recent years as the Tigers' profile has elevated substantially.
And it wasn't just last year's spectacular run to the Elite Eight; they were really good before that, too.
The stirring and almost stunning thing about what we've witnessed to date this season is how quickly the Tigers have rebounded from some substantial losses. PJ Hall's name is going to be in the rafters one day. Joe Girard was an exceptional shooter. Jack Clark was a valuable piece. RJ Godfrey was no small departure.
If you're thinking deeply about how this can happen, this quickly, you can't think for long without thinking of the transfer portal.
Jaeden Zackery and Viktor Lakhin have been here for a matter of months. If you didn't know anything about Clemson basketball and were told last night that they've been here for five years you wouldn't have spent a second questioning it. Same with Myles Foster, a transfer.
If we take ourselves back to the pre-portal era, perhaps the biggest skepticism most of us had was the cultural drawbacks of frequently adding players who have not spent years being steeped in the DNA of a program.
And sure, there are plenty of examples out there of those fears being realized.
But the what does this do to the locker room thing?
Here?
No.
Right here, right now it's officially laughable to say that the right type of transfer at the right time cannot be absolutely perfect for your program and the culture that underpins it.
All these new faces, and this team's collective mental and physical toughness is still strong enough to make Kentucky wilt.
On top of making Penn State wilt last week.
"Our margin is still smaller than some," Brownell told Tigerillustrated.com. "But man I love the tenacity we play with, and the way our guys are playing for each other. I do think our guys are doing that. We've gotten team buy-in. That's not easy to do all the time, no matter whether you're recruiting transfers or high-school guys. It's still managing people and parents and everybody else, too. There's a lot of voices in these kids' heads."
The elephant in the room here, of course, is Dabo Swinney's approach to the transfer portal. We believe he's more serious about it now than before, and his roster-management actions in the coming weeks should bear that out.
Basketball is different from football; Brownell became a deft navigator of the NIL and portal world in large part because he didn't have the luxury of tradition and highly regarded recruiting classes year after year. Swinney's high-school recruiting model has worked quite well until now, when the 2025 class is suffering an eye-opening number of defections.
So in a lot of ways the premises and priorities between basketball and football can be viewed as apples and oranges.
But Brownell's successful approach nonetheless imparts essential, basic lessons that most certainly should be considered enlightening to football or any other sport.
We asked him how he's perfected the art of portal speed-dating while also identifying not only the right players, but the right type of people between the ears.
His full answer was really good. So we'll just get out of the way and give him the floor:
"It's hard. There's research just in terms of phone calls you're making. There's film watching. And there's a little bit of luck, no doubt.
"And then it's a little bit of how you recruit them. You've got to recruit them the right way. In my opinion you've got to recruit them with: 'This is what it is.' I'm very honest as a recruiter. My strength and my weakness is my honesty. I'm more undersell and overdeliver rather than tell you you're going to be an All-American and you're going to average 18 points a game, 10 rebounds and do all these things. I don't know; that's just more who I am as a person. But in some ways you can say people out there are lying to kids in recruiting, and they really do. That sounds pretty harsh, but that's what it is in a lot of ways. And kids get disgruntled when you promise them something, especially a kid that's transferring.
"But when a kid is transferring and he's older, especially really older -- grad student, senior, that kind of thing -- a lot of times by that point it's playing time. It's a role. It's chance to win. It's basketball. It's not the other things. It's not academics. It's not how cool your campus is. It's not all that stuff, especially if you're recruiting the right kind of kid -- a basketball player that wants to win and wants to be good and wants to be coached and likes the way you play and the system and the style, and they've done their research on you.
"But you've got to be honest with what it is and why you're recruiting them, what you see their role being. And then it better be pretty damned close to that. Like, it better not vary much. Or you're going to have a problem when you're coaching them. And then you can have a problem with your team. That's the critical importance of what it all is, is being honest with role definition and expectations and how we do things, and here are things about our program that are hard and if that's not something you're interested in you probably don't want to come here.
"And we've gotten a few kids out of the ACC, so I think with the kids in the league there's been some respect for the success of the program, how we play, and when you go against us what it's like when you look at our guys. What kind of team camaraderie do we have? You don't know all the stuff from playing against us, but you know some stuff playing against each other. I think that was appealing to some of the guys, certainly Girard and Zackery and Jack Clark. All three."
For the cultural fit to work with transfers, the burden is not just on the guys coming in. It also takes buy-in from the players he's joining.
The addition of Girard doesn't work if Chase Hunter isn't fully on board with it. Same with Zackery and Hunter.
Brownell and his staff could've gotten away with not pursuing another guard from the portal this past cycle after losing Girard. Chase's brother Dillon has already shown some major developmental gains this season from last year, and freshman Del Jones has been more than ready for the moment.
"We told Joe Girard we thought we had a team that could go to the Final Four and we needed someone to play alongside Chase Hunter. We told him: 'This is what we are selling you on because we've seen you. We know you.'
"With Jaeden Zackery, we liked the fact that he was different from Joe. That meant Chase was going to play a little different from the way he played last year. It was: 'We think you guys fit together and here's why you fit.' And then you've got to have guys on your team who want those guys to come. That's just as important, especially when you're recruiting proven, high-major players like Girard and Zackery. Chase Hunter's got to want to come in and let Joe Girard get some shots. Chase Hunter has been here a long time. That's pretty unselfish. He just wants to win.
"We knew Dillon was going to take a big step. But giving Chase an older, experienced guard was going to give Dillon some room to take that step."
Brownell has been at the transfer thing for quite a while now, dating to when Shelton Mitchell and Marcquise Reed and Eli Thomas played such integral roles in the 2018 team advancing to the Round of 16.
More words from all those years of portal wisdom:
"At the end of the day, guys that have transferred once or twice and are at the end of their careers -- that's what they're looking for: The basketball better be right. It better be what you say it's going to be or it's going to be hard to manage them and you're going to have locker room trouble. ... It's hard enough to beat your opponent. There's a lot of teams that beat themselves. We really try not to do that. We really try to be rock solid, and that's our daily approach with how we do things and care about each other and role definition and accountability and appreciation for each other. I just think we do a good job in all that.
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"And you don't always know with the high school guys either, even though you have done more research on them because you've been recruiting them longer. You probably have a better feel, but you don't always know how they're going to develop as players, how quickly they're going to learn. Some of them have trouble learning things. How competitive are they really when it gets hard? Do they kind of give in when things get challenging? Are they excuse-makers, or are they guys that stand and fight? So you're dealing with that with anybody.
"The hard part with young players is it's the first time in a lot of their lives that they're not playing as much as they want to play, and not as much as their families want them to play. So do they stay and stick it out? Or do they just leave? So that also goes back to being honest in your recruitment of them -- like, 'Hey this is what we see and it might take a year or two to get significant time.' So you can still have all that, and you don't get all the high school guys right because people can surprise you and leave. It happens.
"But there's a lot of kids in the transfer portal who are good kids. They're good players and they're good kids. They're leaving because they want something different. They want a better situation. Maybe things weren't what they were told when they were at the place they were their first time, you know? Maybe they're just looking for something different and they look at your program and see a lot of really good things."
Good things like last night.
And plenty of good things still to come.
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It's early, but that seems like a certainty.
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