Clemson Basketball: Tigers host Florida State with double bye still in play

Coming off a beatdown of Georgia Tech which saw Clemson Men's Basketball exact a measure of revenge against the Yellow Jackets on their home court, Brad Brownell's Tigers must avoid a reverse of that scenario as the Florida State Seminoles visit Littlejohn Coliseum Saturday evening.

Clemson defeated Leonard Hamilton's team by double digits on January 20th in Tallahassee, but the Tigers haven't played particularly well at home outside of the Miami game since the New Year, losing a couple of winnable games that has made their path a bit more difficult.

With five games left in their regular season ACC schedule Clemson finds themselves in a jumble of teams battling for the fourth and final double-bye into the ACC Tournament.

Wake Forest is 9-6, followed by Clemson, Pittsburgh, N.C. State and Florida State all at 8-7, Syracuse at 8-8 and Virginia Tech at 7-9.

The Tigers have wins over Pittsburgh, Florida State and Syracuse, with losses to N.C. State and Virginia Tech.

With the Seminoles, Panthers, Orange and Deacons still ahead on the schedule the charge should be pretty clear: The Tigers need to win if they want the double bye.

Therein lies the conundrum, or at least one of the conundrums, of Brad Brownell's teams.

Clemson should be favored in each of their next four games and theoretically could enter the final regular season contest against Wake Forest with the double-bye sewn up.

But this is Clemson basketball and nothing comes easy, so I would expect the roller coaster to continue, though I'd certainly prefer the type of performance we saw Wednesday against Georgia Tech became the standard, not the exception.

Florida State has three double-digit scorers on their team led by forward Jamir Watkins at 14.8 per contest along with guards Darin Green, Jr. and Primo Spears at 11.6 and 10.1 points respectively.

The Seminoles are not a particularly good rebounding team, residing in the same stratosphere as the Tigers in that regard, and not standing out on the offensive boards.

Speaking of rebounding, I'm intrigued by the sudden disappearance on the boards of Ian Schieffelin, who poured in 19 points in 24 minutes against Georgia Tech, but recorded only 3 rebounds, all in the first half.

Over his last five games, totaling 132 minutes, Schieffelin is credited with 38 rebounds, only 6 of which were offensive boards.

Perhaps this is related to the emergence of Jack Clark on the boards, who in that same five games has grabbed 35 rebounds with 6 being of the offensive variety.

Disappearance may be too strong of a descriptor, as there's nothing wrong with 7.6 rebounds per game, but the trend is noticeably down in recent games.

Just something to keep an eye on moving forward.

Clemson Men's Basketball takes on Florida State on Saturday at 7:45 on TheCW.

Just like last Saturday and next Saturday against Notre Dame, Clemson finds itself on TheCW at 7:45 EST in the matchup with the Seminoles.

Clemson is a 10-point favorite over Florida State at publishing time.

Next week Clemson hosts Pitt on Wednesday and then travels to South Bend to take on the Fighting Irish.

Game odds refresh periodically and are subject to change.