Jeremiah Martin and the Memphis Tigers win their final regular season game against Tulsa. Now they will prepare for the AAC Tournament that will take place here at FedEx Forum later this week.
After the way Jeremiah Martin performed against Tulane and in the last five games, it is his world and we are just living in his greatness.Â
Martin said after the 102-76 beat down of the Green Wave that his coaches and teammates encouraged him to continue to perform at such a high level.
“It was really within the team. They just kept trying to give me the ball, to be honest,†Martin said. “I’m not that type of person that wants to shoot the ball every time like that. So, a couple of those shots I was shooting (were) off because I really didn’t want to take them, to be honest. But I really felt like I could score once I left the first half and I had like 17, but then I got subbed for three or four minutes because I got the second foul and I knew once I scoreda certain amount in the first half, I should be able to score that.â€
Martin has been averaging 27 points per game prior to playing against Tulane on Wednesday. He continued his hot streak by dropping a record setting 43 points against the Green Wave, knocking 15 of his 24 field goals and going 5-of-9 from downtown.
The senior guard said he tries to go with the flow of the game, and he did just that. He dominated Tulane single-handedly and went on an 8-0 in the first half.
Scoring is what Martin does, though he openly admits he doesn’t try to. He got his career high earlier this month during his hot streak against USF where he ended the night with 41 points, all made in the second half. Since then, Martin scored 26 against Cincinnati, 12 against UConn, 31 versus Eastern Carolina and 25 at Central Florida. Martin mentioned that he is the best player in the conference, and he displayed how great he is against Tulane, a team that is winless in the American Athletic Conference.
Martin’s performance against the Green Wave was historic. He is the first Memphis Tiger in program history to score 40 or more points twice in his career. It is worth noting only seven other Tigers have scored 40 or more points, which includes legendary player Larry Finch, who once dropped 40 in his time at Memphis State.
Fellow Tigers Mike Parks and Alex Lomax praised Martin after the game, saying he is the “heart and soul†of this team and “makes them go.†The senior guard said hearing votes of confidence from his teammates means a lot to him.
“It’s great just to know everybody is pulling for me,†Martin said. “I don’t have any tension or I don’t have no guys that’s thinking, ‘Like man, he’s not the heart and soul of the team’, so it’s just great when I got the team on my back and they help me a lot because I really felt I was struggling at the beginning of the season.â€
Martin mentioned he had some of his teammates encourage him to keep pushing, and he eventually had a meeting with head coach Penny Hardaway earlier in the season that he attributed to helping his game improved.
Hardaway spoke about that meeting, saying it was a difficult situation but necessary to bring the best out of the senior guard.
“It was not a fun meeting for him or myself,†Hardaway said. “But I knew I had to grab the bull by the horns, Jeremiah, because he seems like he was just floating, like he was uninterested and that he felt disrespected by a lot of things that were going on this year. So, I knew I had to talk to him. But once we left the meeting, we were on the same page, and everything started going perfectly for me, for him and for the team.â€
