My guys, or his guys? Brad Brownell makes no distinction, claims all as his own

My guys, or his guys?

It all depends on how you look at it.

Clemson men's basketball coach Brad Brownell gets a bit rankled when some people assume that he makes a distinction between the players he personally recruited and those he inherited from a previous coaching staff.

"I just don't think that way," said Brownell recently. "They're your players, and you coach them.

"That would be like me saying that I don't care as much about Tanner Smith or Andre Young or Demontez Stitt or Jerai Grant, even now, because I only coached them a year or two. That's just the furtherest thing from the truth."

Brownell said that last season, some people questioned his decisions about playing time based on the 'mine or his' assumption.

"It was funny, I had people last year who were criticizing me - people you wouldn't expect - by saying that I wasn't playing the guys that I had recruited more," he said. "That makes no sense to me - that because I recruited them that I would play them more than the guys who were already here. That bothers me and it rubs me the wrong way.

"I think when you take over a job, those are your players. You treat them the right way, and with the guys you recruited, that's fine, too. But they're no more special. Everybody's the same, and we just see what we can do with what we've got."

Seniors Milton Jennings and Devin Booker are the only holdovers from Oliver Purnell's time as head coach.