Patience has been the driving force behind Clemson basketball’s recent run atop the ACC under head coach Brad Brownell.
Over the past 14 years, Brownell has sometimes operated in a kind of football-shielded obscurity, but that didn’t prevent the coaching hot seat from reaching lukewarm temperatures during the lean years.
Playing a type of Southern second fiddle to Clemson’s football team never fully overshadowed Brownell’s program. It did afford him the time to build one of the ACC’s most consistent winners.
“People in the program, administratively, saw the progress that was being made,” Brownell told Hoops HQ.
After one NCAA Tournament berth in his first seven years, Brownell has coached the Tigers into March Madness in four of the last eight seasons. He has posted a winning record in 14 of his 15 seasons at Clemson, guiding the Tigers to five NCAA appearances. They reached the Sweet Sixteen in 2018 and the Elite Eight in 2024.
How far has Brownell come at Clemson? In 2015-16, Clemson played its home games in Greenville, 45 minutes northeast of campus, while Littlejohn Coliseum underwent a $63-million renovation. At the time, Brownell was in his sixth year, striving to carve out a place in an ACC landscape lorded over by coaching icons such as Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, Jim Boeheim and Rick Pitino.
Now, Brownell is the longest tenured coach in the ACC, and he is the league’s winningest active big whistle.
It’s been such an impressive run that in the offseason, Brownell — an Evansville, Ind. native — even had a “couple of conversations” with Indiana about its open coaching position, though he said he was “never their top choice.”
“I feel really good about the things we’re doing here,” Brownell said. “I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished. I would like to accomplish a few more things. And I just love living here. This is a great place and I think I really fit very well here, so pretty, pretty easy for me to stay.”
The road to this point has been a climb. The path ahead, at the very least, is treacherously winding. While the school has stepped up financial support and facility improvements, Clemson basketball has struggled to compete with ACC peers in terms of transfer portal and NIL spending.
Still, for Brownell, there’s no going backwards.
“The biggest thing that changed is obviously in the first six or seven years here I was doing a lot of fundraising and fundraising to help prove our facilities,” Brownell said. “When we recruited against folks, we were hit pretty hard with it. ‘You know they don’t have great facilities. They really don’t care about basketball at Clemson. It’s a football school.’”
Senior guard Dillon Hunter has been around Clemson basketball for the better part of a decade. His older brother, Chase, played for the Tigers from 2019-2025, blossoming into a first-team All-ACC selection. Dillon Hunter can recall walking around Clemson’s campus before his freshman season. The team had gone just 49-39 the past three years, but the players were confident things were headed in the right direction.
The rest of the campus didn’t share the same level of optimism.
“We felt like people even around Clemson didn’t believe,” Hunter told HoopsHQ. “They were asking us, ‘Are we going to be good?’ I’m like, ‘You all are asking? I already know we’re going to be good.’”
Hunter said he’s seen Brownell become more and more involved in his players’ off-the-court lives over the years he’s known him. He’s also seen Brownell adjust to the new realities of college basketball.
“Coach is a dude who has a growth mindset. He’s adaptable. He’s adapted to the times we’re in,” Hunter said. “He recruited Chase before COVID. That was a different time. It was before NIL and all those things. He’s become even more relatable to us, asking us about certain things. He’ll come down to the locker room, talking to guys. He’s more getting into the fray and being open to different things.”
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Brownell understands the game has changed in terms of roster management, NIL and the transfer portal. And Clemson has been plenty active in recent years, making key additions including Jaeden Zackery, Viktor Lahkin, Joe Girard and Jack Clark. But Brownell also is quick to point out that the stars who really helped elevate Clemson to its best seasons have been players the Tigers recruited and developed — a list that includes PJ Hall, Ian Schieffelin, Hunter Tyson and Chase Hunter.
“When we’ve been at our best, those guys were the all-conference players,” Brownell said. “And they’re guys that we developed in our program and guys that were here you know four in five years and really got better and grew within our program. That’s still something we want to do.”
And the patient approach may pay off yet again for the Tigers, who count six true or redshirt freshmen on the roster this season. Only three ACC teams list more on their rosters and two of them — Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech — included at least one international recruit who played professionally in Europe last season. Add in six new transfers, and Brownell and Clemson are very much starting over after going 51-19 the past two years.
“It’s challenging. There’s no doubt about it,” Brownell said. “There’s just a lot of newness. There’s a lot of energy and enthusiasm and guys that are excited and those are all really good things, but it’s a little slower going in terms of teaching.”
Hunter is the only returner who played last season. (Clemson also brought back two players who redshirted, a rarity in this era of college basketball.)
Brownell added six transfers from the portal: two juniors, three seniors and a graduate student. That group includes 6-foot-8 senior forward RJ Godfrey, who played two seasons at Clemson before transferring and spending last year at Georgia, where he started 33 games.
Six-foot-ten senior forward Nick Davidson (Nevada) and 6-foot-1 senior guard Jestin Porter (Middle Tennessee State) are proven scorers that Clemson hopes can replace the scoring of Chase Hunter and Schieffelin from last year’s squad.
Among the freshmen, 6-foot-10 center Trent Steiner could have an immediate impact, while 6-foot-9 forward Blake Davidson is likely to redshirt this season; 6-foot-4 guard Zac Foster could earn minutes as a true freshman, in part, due to his positional versatility. He and fellow rookie Chase Thompson, a 6-foot-8 wing, are more physically advanced than many freshmen Brownell has coached previously.
Turning that collection of talents into a cohesive and capable team is no small challenge, though across the nation it’s becoming the charge of college basketball coaches.
Hunter said the team has spent the offseason fishing, boating and going out to eat together, building a genuine camaraderie he hopes will translate to chemistry on the court. Despite varied backgrounds and myriad skills, Hunter said the entire roster is aligned in its goals: Win the ACC and make a deep run in March.
Hunter takes a particular level of personal pride in how far Clemson has come since he and his brother joined the program. “We’ve brought it to this expectation level now,” he said.
And, after years of building the program to this point, Brownell is enjoying the newest challenge — keeping Clemson among the ACC’s top programs.
“It’s fun,” he said, repeating that phrase twice more, each time sounding more convincing. “Hey, are there times I get frustrated? Yeah, there are, because I’d like to be doing something faster. But, man, it’s also really fun. It reminds you to be a good teacher. You’ve gotta teach what you want, gotta do it a bunch of different ways and you gotta spend time with kids.”
Once again, it’s about patience.
