Three home runs and a ninth-inning charge weren’t enough.
Notre Dame beat Clemson 5-4 Tuesday at Truist Field in the opening round of the ACC Tournament, ending what is almost certainly the Tigers’ 2026 season. At 31-27, Clemson’s record doesn’t make a case for an NCAA at-large selection, and this loss in single-elimination play likely closes the book on Tigers and Erik Bakich’s fourth year.
The loss stings because Clemson had the firepower to win. Jacob Jarrell, Tyler Lichtenberger, and Bryce Clavon each went deep, and Tryston McCladdie drove in a run to account for all four Tiger runs. All three home runs were solo shots. That’s it. Every other runner stranded, every other chance gone.
The problem wasn’t the home runs. It was everything between them.
Clemson drew one walk all game and struck out 12 times against a Notre Dame staff that never let the lineup breathe. Jack Radel worked 6.1 innings, allowed two earned runs, and punched out eight. For long stretches, the Tiger lineup chased or went passive, and Radel made them pay. When Clemson did make contact, it was usually with nobody on base.
Michael Sharman took the mound as the team’s most reliable arm, entering with a 6-1 record and a 3.21 ERA. He didn’t make it out of the fourth, giving up six hits and three earned runs before Bakich went to the bullpen. Eight strikeouts say the stuff was there. Notre Dame still hit him when it counted. Jayce Lee went 3-for-3 with a walk and two RBI for the Irish, the kind of disciplined, damage-making at-bats that Clemson couldn’t produce anywhere in the lineup.
Ariston Veasey and Hayden Simmerson each covered two innings in relief, and each allowed one run. The bullpen kept it a game. The offense couldn’t do its part.
Notre Dame spread the damage across four innings, scoring in the first, third, sixth and eighth. Clemson answered with two in the third to briefly level things, then scratched single runs in the seventh and ninth. But the final two innings told the real story.
The eighth was the backbreaker. Clemson went down in order in the top half while Notre Dame added one more in the bottom to push it to 5-3. The Tigers needed to answer and couldn’t. That’s been the pattern all year, good enough to stay in games, not equipped to win them. The ninth gave Clemson one last shot. They scored to make it 5-4, put the tying run in reach, and made Noah Rooney earn the final outs. Rooney didn’t blink. The season went out the same way it often played out over six months: enough fight to make things interesting, not enough to finish it.
For a program that knocked off No. 7 Coastal Carolina as recently as May 6 and proved it could compete with ranked opponents, Tuesday is a rough way to go. But the Tigers entered Charlotte as the 15th seed, and that number doesn’t lie. A team seeded that low in their own conference needs a near-perfect game to advance. This wasn’t one.
For the seniors, the last game in orange is done. The late stretch against Florida State and the weeks that followed revealed this group’s ceiling and where it ran out. Jarrell, Jack Crighton, Sharman, Luke Gaffney. Players who gave years to this program and left it with more than they found. A 31-27 record doesn’t always capture what a season felt like to live through.
But that’s what the line reads.
Bakich heads into the offseason with work ahead. Lineup depth, bullpen construction, the decisions that turn a bubble program into one that doesn’t need everything to go right in Charlotte just to stay alive. The talent is here to be better. Whether it comes together depends on what happens between now and next February.
Tuesday was the last answer this group got to give.
