CLEMSON -- Occasionally in recent years, Brad Brownell has compared the rhythms of a basketball season to those of football.
Basketball has multiple games in a week, thus regardless of the result everyone has to quickly turn their attention to grinding for the next test.
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Football has a mere one game a week and 12 in a non-pandemic regular season, allowing for more decompression and reflection before the page turns.
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Brownell has suggested that in basketball it's harder because of the quick pivots between more games.
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The last week has given him and his team a taste of what it's like for football.
Clemson last walked off the floor in Greensboro around 5 PM on Wednesday, March 10.
Clemson will walk onto the floor in Indianapolis late Friday night.
Extended time off between games is not foreign this year because of COVID pauses, of which Clemson has had two.
But this setup is quite a bit different because of the stakes, and because of what happened last time out.
The Tigers suffered a disappointing one-and-done in Greensboro and are now in an absolute do-or-die situation entering the NCAA Tournament.
As a coach, how do you manage your messaging to your team when there's so much time between games, so much time to brood over the flaws that allowed No. 13 seed Miami to advance?
How much is overkill? How little is underkill?
Brownell addressed this when the team was still in Greensboro, as the Tigers stayed the night after the loss before heading back to the Upstate.
"Right after the game, I was pretty disappointed and I was demanding with them," he said. "Because we should've won the game, and we did not get it done. We should all feel bad for that. It's not OK to lose that game.
"We marinated on that for a while and went back to the hotel, and it was very quiet for several hours. Nobody was too happy, and I didn't want them to be happy.
"Later that night, we had our late snack and I told our guys that was the time the mourning should end. Like: 'It's OK to talk and joke around a little bit. You guys are a team that is going to be rewarded for all your hard work and sacrifice this year, and you're going to make the NCAA Tournament. And while that loss should not be forgotten and we need to learn from it, we're going to watch the film when we get back in a couple of days and really analyze it and that's not going to be fun. But I don't want us to just sulk for two days. I don't want us to have a miserable ride back. We're going to get past it."
Brownell would like to point out that a narrow loss to Miami, regardless of the seeding, isn't the monster upset some might've made it out to be. Clemson won by a point on the Hurricanes' home floor, and by eight on Miami's visit to Littlejohn Coliseum.
Clemson played well in the first half last week, hitting eight of 11 3-pointers, but was up just four because of some defensive lapses.
If Nick Honor's runner at the end goes in, perception is probably a lot different.
"We didn't play terrible," Brownell said. "We played Miami three times, and two of the games were one possession and one of the games was three possessions. It was going to be a close game. ... They made a lot of hard shots, and then they played better down the stretch, coached better and beat us."
Late last week, the team sat down to watch the film and it wasn't a pleasant experience.
"The guys didn't really like it, but we did it because I knew that's what we needed to do to continue to teach and coach and get better," Brownell said. "We've had good practices since then."
The protocol-laden transition to the bubble in Indianapolis brought more solitary time, as the team was holed up in hotel rooms for more than 24 hours awaiting two rounds of test results.
That was more time to think about what happened last time out.
Which might've built a greater appreciation for what football goes through every week during the fall.
"I think there's an appropriate amount of time when you don't perform well, you don't do your job, to understand it and to reflect on it," Brownell said. "And sometimes you've got to make your kids understand that.
"The old-school days of you sitting in the back of the bus and nobody talks for three hours and you just kind of deal with it because you can't get away, that's almost over now because you can get on your phone and just escape.
"So we had our little brief period of mourning, but I was quickly trying to get our guys to get past it and reflect on all the good things we've done as well. And we've done a lot of good things."
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