Texas Southern H&PE Arena didn’t have much of an unusual feel late Thursday night as Prairie View rained 3-pointers against the Tigers in their regular-season finale.
But it wasn’t hard to not notice something was conspicuously missing from the rafters in the arena. Kevin Granger’s No.10 banner, which has been retired since 2002 and was directly to the left of Harry “Machine Gun” Kelly’s No. 43 banner, was gone.
No explanation. No press release. Not a word.
Now, let’s keep it real: Texas Southern University and its former star basketball player from the 1990s, who went on to become the school’s bold athletic director, have issues that seem irreparable at this point.
Granger, as we know, has been on leave since last summer when it was revealed he is facing a $1 million lawsuit for allegedly assaulting a female staffer. The details in the legal report are pretty deplorable.
TSU hasn’t said much about Granger since announcing last summer that the athletic department leader was on a leave of absence while the school conducted its investigation into the sexual assault claims.
It’s been nearly a year, and TSU hasn’t said a word about Granger’s status, leaving us to believe the investigation is really taking this long to find out if Granger did what the detailed report said he did. Even Mayberry Deputy Barney Fife would have concluded his investigation by now.
The school has even recruited Paula Jackson to move to Houston to serve as the interim athletic director.
All the while, there has been no transparency or accountability from Texas Southern.
Somebody made the decision to remove Granger’s banner on gameday of the final game of the regular season and had the audacity not to say why. While many of my reporting contemporaries assumed the narrative based solely on the missing banner, I started contacting school officials at 8 a.m. the following morning to find out who made the decision and why, and also to get an understanding of how far the erasure of Granger is going.
Are his statistics no longer a part of the record books? Is his place in the Texas Southern Sports Hall of Fame gone?
Remember that Granger, a recruit of TSU coaching legend Robert Moreland, was a four-year star from 1992-96. He led the NCAA in scoring in 1996 with a 27-point-per-game average. He was SWAC Freshman of the Year, a two-time Black College All-American, and when he left TSU, Granger was the fifth-leading scorer in school history with 1,971 points.
Granger was also an assistant coach at TSU. He later became AD Charles McClelland’s trusted lieutenant before assuming control of the athletic department once McClelland left to run the SWAC. Granger was doing so well at his job that in 2024, the school extended his contract until 2029.
Given all of that, I wanted to talk to the decision-makers who chose to take down the banner of one of the school’s most decorated and distinguished athletes. So far, there has been nothing but silence.
But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that this decision came from the TSU Board of Regents and was executed by President James W. Crawford. The thing is, if the school wanted to do this quietly or without transparency, all it had to do was take the banner down the morning after the regular-season finale men’s and women’s basketball games.
Nobody would have noticed until the start of the 2026-27 basketball season. But that would have been too much like right.
TSU seems to want to do things as awkwardly as possible, sometimes ignoring its transparency obligations as a state-funded institution.
The notion of not saying what has been obvious since late last summer is ridiculous. The school has moved on from Granger. The Tigers’ athletic department will be led by Jackson or someone else going forward.
Even though Granger isn’t facing criminal charges for his alleged acts against the staffer, there is no way the school can brush him off and restore him back at the helm.
The school may also be within its rights to take down Granger’s banner, but it does at least owe an explanation to the alumni and fan base.
