Clemson coach Brad Brownell has the Tigers off to a 5-1 start.

Associated Press

CLEMSON, S.C. - Brad Brownell grew up in Evansville, Ind., idolizing the teams of legendary Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight.

Eventually Brownell became a basketball coach in North Carolina, first as an assistant and then as the head coach of UNC Wilmington. There, in the middle of Tobacco Road, he began to appreciate play in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Now Brownell steps into his first Big Ten/ACC Challenge tonight as Clemson’s head coach against Michigan (9 p.m., ESPN2), the annual series melding the conferences he loves.

“(I) felt those were two elite basketball leagues that do things the right way,” Brownell said. “And hoped at one point in my career, maybe, maybe that I get an opportunity to coach in one of those leagues.”

When Oliver Purnell left Clemson for DePaul in the off-season, Brownell, who had been a head coach at UNC Wilmington and Wright State, jumped at the chance to lead the Tigers.

It meant teaching a new group of players, no matter their experience level under Purnell, a new system and new philosophy. It meant everything taking double in practice. What would take one day to teach with a returning team took two. A 15-minute explanation took 30.

Much like Michigan has all young players, Clemson is a young team because all of its players need to learn, including seniors Demontez Stitt and Jerai Grant.

So far, it has worked. Clemson is 5-1 entering Tuesday’s game led by Stitt, who is averaging 13.7 points a game. Michigan (3-2) will recognize Stitt from its 2009 first-round NCAA tournament game against the Tigers, when he scored two points but had six assists and four rebounds.

Back then, under Purnell, Clemson was a team with a go-to player in Trevor Booker. Now they are similar to this year’s Michigan team in that there isn’t a bonafide star. His team also runs more motion offense than Purnell, who ran more set plays. Defensively, Brownell said, his team plays mostly man-to-man defense instead of mixing it up throughout the game like Clemson did under Purnell.

“I didn’t know what to expect in some ways,” Brownell said. “We don’t have, we’re kind of like Michigan in some ways in that we don’t have that one go-to player that is an all-conference guy that you can kind of rely on to run the program or be the guy at the end of games and all those kinds of things.”

Clemson knows this - like it was for Michigan a week ago - is the start of a litmus test. The Wolverines learned where they stood in the lexicon of major college basketball in Atlantic City, N.J., during losses to Syracuse and UTEP. For the Tigers, who have games against South Carolina and Florida State in December, it is just beginning.

“When we hit ACC play and those kinds of things, it’ll be interesting to see where we really are,” Brownell said. “This will be a good week for us.”

em>Michael Rothstein covers University of Michigan basketball for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at (734) 623-2558, by e-mail at michaelrothstein@annarbor.com or follow along on Twitter @mikerothstein