Marquette Men’s Basketball announced three former members of their program are headed to the rafters during the upcoming 2025-26 season. The three are Tom Crean, Markus Howard and Chicago native Jerel McNeal.
McNeal was a standout All-American guard at Hillcrest High School before playing for Marquette from 2005 to 2009. Crean was his coach for the first three seasons before he went to Indiana. Buzz Williams coached McNeal during his senior season.
The famed Golden Eagles was the Big East’s Defensive Player of the Year in 2006-07 as a sophomore. The following season he was the only guard on the Big East’s All First Team.
During his time at Marquette, he broke George Thompson’s 41-year scoring record of 1,773 points. McNeal finished his college career with 1,995 points but his school record would later be broken by Howard in 2019.
Despite losing Marquette’s all-time leader in points, he remains their leader in steals, field goals made, and field goal attempts. He is also third all-time in games played and seventh in assists for the Golden Eagles.
He averaged 15.3 points on 44 percent shooting with 4.7 rebounds, 3.5 assists, 2.2 steals, and 0.5 blocks per game across 130 games. His 19.8 points per game his senior was third in the Big East that season.
McNeal took to Twitter/X to share a quick comment on the announcement. He quote-tweeted the post and added “Sometimes words are not enough” as well as a five different emojis.
After college, he went undrafted but played professionally in the NBA D League, NBA , TBT Tournament and overseas in Belgium, Italy, China, Greece, Germany and Israel from 2009 to 2020.
Since then he’s been working as media personality, done some coaching and has done work with the McNeal/Acker foundation which he helped co-founded.
McNeal is currently a head coach for the Nike Meanstreets EYBL 17u team.
For more about McNeal, check out his Marquette Golden Eagles Men’s Basketball page here.
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