Sights, sounds and showers

Al Adams and Sanford Rogers are great Clemson people. They've been around these parts a long time, and I've been lucky to get to know them through their assistance of sports information director Tim Bourret in game-day management.

But I've long been jealous of Adams and Rogers, because they get some prime seating at Littlejohn Coliseum. Prime seating as in: directly beside the visiting bench. Just imagine what these guys have heard over the years from the mouths of Gary Williams, Mike Krzyzewski and others.

I made this jealousy known before last night's game, prompting an invite to sit at Position A. And when you're offered a chance to occupy Position A with Seth Greenberg in the house, you don't turn that down.

He was pretty calm for most of the first half, largely because his team led for most of the first half. But you just knew the eruption was coming sooner or later.

He started getting hotter in the second half, repeatedly taking swigs from two water bottles sitting atop the scorer's table. He started bemoaning his players' lack of toughness. He gave his assistants mean looks when something went wrong. He glared at the towel guy for not supplying him a towel quickly enough. He slammed the table with the palm of his hand.

And then ... boom. With a little more than a minute left, Andre Young forced a turnover beyond the perimeter and Greenberg lost it. He grabbed one of the water bottles and hurled it at the floor, about two inches from my right foot.

And here came a shower, all over me and the security guy sitting to my right.

"Did you want a bath?" the security guy says to me.

Priceless.

-- Great win for the Tigers last night. Wasn't long ago that close games seemed like automatic losses, and now this team has won by three points and two points in its last two games.

This team is guaranteed a .500 finish in ACC play. Amazing. The conference has left a lot to be desired this season, but it's still a heck of a tribute to this staff and these players.

As was written in this column Thursday, a lesser-coached team does not recover after that excruciating home loss to Maryland on Feb. 7. The Tigers had lost six of eight games at that point, and the losses were by an average of 3.3 points.

Now Clemson is looking at five wins in its last six games.

“It’s because of the way we work and the way we practice every day and how hard these guys go at it that we’ve improved," Brad Brownell said after the game. "We’re a better team in February than we were in November and December. We’re markedly better. We’ve had 25 or 30 games and a bunch of good practices. Things have come our way a little bit.”

-- The officiating was brutal at times, and two of those times were in the last 12 seconds. Hard to see how Jamie Luckie can make that offensive-foul call on Young. Hard to see how he can make that call on Milton Jennings when it looked like Jennings had made a great block with less than three seconds left.

Not sure how this crew missed a double-dribble on Virginia Tech with less than eight minutes left. Clemson was up nine, and Erick Green followed the no-call by draining the first of three Hokies 3-pointers over a span of less than two minutes. It was a big sequence.

Something tells me we might be discussing Luckie for a minute or two on Mickey Plyler's show this morning.

-- Shame that more people didn't stick around for the post-game ceremony honoring the Tigers' four seniors.

Brownell gave a very thoughtful, heartfelt speech honoring Tanner Smith, Andre Young, Bryan Narcisse and Catalin Baciu.

Hard to imagine any Clemson fan watching the ceremony who wasn't proud to have Brownell as the Tigers' coach. Classy dude who seems to really like being here.

-- And so we have four 8-7 teams tied for fourth place in the ACC standings: Virginia, Clemson, Miami and N.C. State.

Tiebreakers are sorted out by combined record against the tied teams, and here's how that goes:

Virginia 3-1
Clemson 2-2
N.C. State 2-2
Miami 1-3

Clemson gets the edge over N.C. State by virtue of last week's head-to-head victory in the teams' only meeting this season.

So who out there had this team pegged for fifth place before the season?

LW