Five years after being placed on five years' probation by the NCAA in the wake of the most widespread case of eligibility violations in college sports history, Texas Southern is free and clear of NCAA sanctions.

Charles McClelland, TSU's athletic director, and Glenn Lewis, chairman of the TSU board of regents, discussed the department's turnaround and its plans in separate conversations. Comments have been edited for length:

Q: Texas Southern has completed its NCAA probation. Is the heat off the athletic department in terms of focusing on rules compliance?

McClelland: Now that things are going well, the spotlight, the burden, is even greater. We can't afford to slip up. The last thing I want is for somebody to say, 'Uh, oh, there goes Texas Southern again.' We have a history of saying that we are going to do something, working to do it and then having a slip-up and having it be perceived is that we haven't done what we were supposed to do. If you are a (NCAA) repeat violator coming off probation, you're still technically on probation because you need to get out of that repeat violator time window. Just because it's October doesn't mean we can relax. We're still in the same thought process. If we slip up next year, the NCAA will come back and bring up that they just let us off probation, you messed up and now we will use that to close the door on you. We have to maintain vigilance.

Lewis: We cannot relax. We have to make sure that we remain the kind of program that supports student-athletes in the way it is intended to be. The NCAA didn't exactly threaten the death penalty directly, but if you read between the lines of the things they said at the time the sanctions were levied, it was pretty clear to us that if we hadn't taken steps to correct things, we could have received the death penalty by the time they made their findings.

Q: Along with compliance issues, TSU struggled for years with graduation rates and ensuring that athletes were progressing toward a degree. How is it progressing along those lines?

McClelland: Our four-year academic-progress number (a formula used by the NCAA) is 963 (Editor's note: The most recent average for historically black schools is 956, and the FCS average is 960), and our graduation rate last year was 54 percent. We anticipate it to be 64 percent in the next report. The institutional graduation rate is 17 percent. When we got here (in the spring of 2008), our first year we graduated four student-athletes … out of probably 80 seniors. We've averaged 60 for the last four years. It's greater than many people thought Texas Southern would be able to achieve.

Q: Football suffered heavy sanctions in scholarships and recruiting visits because of NCAA rules violations under previous coaches. How difficult has it been for the program to recover and compete?

McClelland: Probation negatively impacted football to the point to where, as you wrote, we were near the death penalty. It's been three decades since SMU received the death penalty for football (in 1987), and it still hasn't fully recovered. Recovery is not an overnight process. The first thing we did with football was bringing in (coach) Darrell Asberry (2012-15), and other than winning games, he did a remarkable job. He took the nation's lowest APR rate for football and built it to the point where we have a graduation rate of about 65 percent. Now we have Michael Haywood (as coach), and I am optimistic. The last part of the process is winning games. Everything else in the football program is solid. You can't almost get the death penalty and win a bunch of football games. It is a process.

Lewis: I think we'll get there. Charles (McClelland) has confidence in coach Haywood, and I have confidence in Charles. I look at our other programs, and we continue to experience success. I am confident that football will catch up.

Q: Are you satisfied with the manner in which TSU teams are competing?

McClelland: Texas Southern has turned around. We won seven conference championships (in 2016-17). We have dominated basketball. We have dominated softball. We have 17 championships in the last three years. In the history of Texas Southern, it has more than 60 championships. We have won 22, a third of that, during our tenure. We finished second (in the SWAC all-sports standings) because Alabama State has more sports than we do. We are more competitive at any point than at any point in TSU's history. We are strong in rules compliance, we are strong academically and strong on the field. I realize clearly that football has more notoriety than other sports. It is my prediction that in the next two years, our football team will be competing for a SWAC championship as well.

Q: Is TSU satisfied competing in the SWAC?

Lewis: I don't think we have any immediate plan to abandon our conference, but most of the schools (in the SWAC) are having some difficulty dealing with academic issues and have received sanctions from the NCAA. Hopefully everybody is taking the appropriate steps as we have to remedy these things, but should it cause our conference to unravel, Texas Southern is well-positioned to find a home elsewhere.

McClelland: We're not looking at this time to leave the SWAC. We want to set ourselves up so that when the next major conference realignment occurs, Texas Southern will be in position to help dictate its own future. For too long, Texas Southern has been in position where we've had to do what others have told us to do because we were not doing things the right way. The message now is that Texas Southern is doing things the right way. We are an asset.

Q: How well does the athletic department do toward being self-sustaining?

McClelland: We will always require a subsidy (of $3 million to $4 million annually). We have a student fee. We spend about $10.2 million. We have done a tremendous amount of winning, and winning costs more. Basketball plays road games to fund the program, and I try to raise money to bridge the gap. Compared to our brother and sister institutions, we do a pretty good job of being self-sustaining.

We almost lost the entire athletic department over compliance issues, so we had to invest in human resources to get those things ironed out. Ten percent to 15 percent goes to ensure that compliance and academics are in order. When I came, we had one compliance officer and an academic person. We now have three people in academics and three in compliance and an academic person for football and men's basketball and one person trained in (compliance) certification. We went from two to nine, and that was just to check off the things the NCAA said we needed to be doing.

Q: Along with maintaining rules compliance and competing for conference titles, what are other priorities for the athletic department?

McClelland: A baseball stadium and locker rooms for some of the Olympic sports. We need to redo the practice facility and the soccer/track stadium. There probably are $50 million to $60 million in projects we would like to do in the next five to 10 years. My job is to go out and find the revenue.