All three men will be honored at a home game during the 2025-26 season.
We will get not one, not two, but THREE banner raising ceremonies at Fiserv Forum during the 2025-26 Marquette men’s basketball season. On Tuesday, Marquette announced that former head coach Tom Crean, former all-time leading scorer Jerel McNeal, and current all-time leading scorer Markus Howard will have a banner raised to the rafters in their honor at a yet to be determined/announced home game.
There will also be a game to honor the 2005-06 team, which was Marquette’s first year in the Big East. Crean was the coach that year and McNeal was a freshman, so it’s unclear as to whether or not that game will be separate from the game where their banners get raised.
Tom Crean went 190-96 in his nine seasons as Marquette head coach, guiding the Golden Eagles to five NCAA tournaments and peaking with the 2002-03 team that reached the Final Four. When Crean was hired in the spring of 1999, MU had missed the NCAA tournament in each of the last two campaigns and hadn’t been to back-to-back tourneys since 1996 and 1997. Crean would snap that back-to-back run with the Final Four team, and in 2008, he became the first Marquette head coach since Hank Raymonds in 1980 to coach MU to three straight NCAA tournaments.
Jerel McNeal graduated from Marquette in 2009 after being a part of four straight NCAA tournament teams, marking the first time that had happened since Al McGuire’s final year was followed by Raymond’s three straight tourneys to start his tenure. Along the way, Marquette posted a record of 94-41 overall with a 43-25 mark in Big East play for the Golden Eagles’ first four seasons after joining the conference. McNeal also broke George Thompson’s 40 year old career scoring record, finishing with 1,985 points. He is still Marquette’s all-time leader in steals with 287.
Markus Howard took Jerel McNeal’s scoring record during the very first game of the 2019-20 season. He finished his career with 2,761 points, making him #23 on the NCAA’s all-time scoring list as well as the first MU men’s basketball player to ever clear 2,000 career points. Howard is also the Big East’s all-time leading scorer as well as both the MU and Big East all-time leader in career three-point field goals. At the time, he was the second two-time consensus All-American in Marquette program history, following in the footsteps of Butch Lee, and those two have since been joined by Tyler Kolek.
I would personally appreciate it if Markus Howard’s banner was raised during the home game against Butler, and I would appreciate it even more if LaVall Jordan was assigned to work as the analyst on the broadcast. Thank you for your consideration at this time.
For more accolades for each man, go check out the official MU press release right here.
Follow Anonymous Eagle on social media
Facebook: AnonymousEagle
Instagram: AnonymousEagleSBN
Bluesky: AnonymousEagle