CLEMSON -- Dating all the way back to his first game as a head coach, Dabo Swinney has made his connection with fans overt and not just easy to see, but to feel.
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Brad Brownell goes about his business quite a bit differently, and sometimes that contrast is miscast as indifference toward an overall environment, or toward a trend of bad calls by the refs, or toward whatever.
One need only sit close to Brownell during a game, or listen to a TV broadcast whose mics happen to be positioned two feet from him, to understand that the intensity burns white-hot and often NSFW.
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Yet Brownell's fire is almost always laser focused on the moving pieces in front of him, and seldom involves the people sitting around and above him.
That's why his gyrations toward the Littlejohn Coliseum crowd, multiple times in the second half Wednesday night against Miami, were so eye-opening.
"That was the first time I've seen coach amp up the crowd; I ain't going to lie to you," Chase Hunter said.
Indeed, over the 14 seasons Brownell has been coaching here we can't recall a previous instance of him feeling the urge to encourage the home crowd to get into the game.
But there he was, doing it.
And there the fans were, seemingly eating up the moment and pushing the volume even louder.
The boisterous environment was part of the perfect storm that turned a four-point deficit into a 17-point win over the final seven minutes.
Of course the main factors were Hunter, who took over and scored 12 points over that stretch, and transfer Jack Clark.
It also helped that the Hurricanes, who hit 12 3-pointers in the first 33 minutes, were cold and gassed from there.
But with Clemson now at 17-7 overall, 7-6 in the ACC and comfortably in the NCAA Tournament picture, there's a feeling that this team's best days could be ahead of it.
The Tigers were denied a landmark win at Duke. They made up for that by going back to Tobacco Road and leaving with a win at North Carolina, and then they followed that up with an impressive win at Syracuse.
Saturday's game against N.C. State at home will mark two weeks since Brownell's team walked off the floor in anguish after Clark's 3-pointer against Virginia missed the mark in a 66-65 defeat.
Raise your hand if you felt remotely optimistic about the rest of the season immediately after that game.
The Tigers will get three more home games thereafter, and they've set themselves up for a much better sendoff than last year's desultory loss to Morehead State in the first round of the NIT.
It would be laying it on too thick to characterize recent events as an epic climb off the mat. Yes, six losses in nine games were a shock to the system because this team looked so good in the pre-conference portion of the schedule.
But in reality they weren't all that far away; Brownell was confident water would eventually find its level in the area of shooting, as a 4-for-39 showing from 3 at home against Georgia Tech and North Carolina was the exception and not the rule.
Over the first 13 games of the season, Clemson hit 10 or more 3-pointers eight times.
Entering Wednesday's game, the Tigers had reached that mark just once over their previous 10 games.
Against Miami they buried a season-high 13 3-pointers on 30 attempts, led by a 5-of-8 clip from Hunter. This after 11-of-31 in Chapel Hill, with Joe Girard and PJ Hall combining for nine of them.
Of course it's not all about shooting, as Clemson hit 11 3-pointers at Miami on Jan. 3 but still lost by 13.
The Hurricanes scored 60 in the second half in that one, and 60 over the entire game two days ago. So yes, getting stops is important.
And the home crowd can play a role in that.
Brownell is fully attuned to the lift that a crowd over in Death Valley can give to the guys wearing helmets and pads when they need a stop.
He longs for more of the same at Littlejohn.
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"It's amazing how that changes everything," he said. "Then the offense, they're trying to call out plays and they're not sure if they can hear them. It puts a little anxiety there in making the right play, and it sometimes causes a turnover, causes a bad shot. And then sometimes the opposing coach, you call timeout. They called two timeouts because the crowd noise was loud. And then at the end of the game, they don't have any in the last two minutes -- because they've had to use it, because your crowd is so loud. ...
"It's huge. And obviously it energizes our players. I mean our guys are on their toes bouncing around to play defense. It's like: 'Why can't we be this way all the time, guys?'"
It can be that way for the rest of the year at Littlejohn.
Maybe that was part of the message from the head coach when he got the crowd into it Wednesday night.
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