UW edge Jeremiah Martin has learned to enjoy ‘the beautiful struggle’ in breakout senior season

By Mike Vorel
Seattle Times staff reporter
Jeremiah Martin keeps moving forward.

UW’s 6-foot-4, 267-pound senior readily admits that “rushing the passer isn’t really my strong suit. I tell Zion (Tupuola-Fetui) and Bralen (Trice) all the time, ‘You guys are way better pass rushers than me.’ I’ve just got to keep moving my feet towards the quarterback and hope I get there before they do.”

Persistence is paying off. In last Saturday’s 49-39 win over Arizona, Martin secured a team-best nine tackles and two sacks — en route to being named Pac-12 Defensive Lineman of the Week. Through seven games, the fifth-year senior’s five sacks ranks third in the Pac-12 and 16th in the nation.

Not bad for a former four-star recruit who amassed 89 tackles and 30.5 sacks as a senior at Cajon High School in San Bernardino, Calif., then promptly disappeared — managing just 11 tackles with three for loss and zero sacks in three seasons and 32 games at Texas A&M. He admitted Tuesday that “there were sleepless nights (in College Station, Texas). There were nights where I’m up thinking I might as well just go back home and work for FedEx or something. But I really just stayed the course.”

In a way, the course brought him back to the beginning — to a college he took an official visit to in 2018. Martin transferred to UW in 2021 and contributed 13 tackles and his first career sack in 11 games last season. After being voted a captain this summer, the senior edge has delivered a blue-collar breakthrough — posting 26 tackles, 5.5 tackles for loss, five sacks and a forced fumble in his first seven games.

His success arrived on its own timeline.

“Like I told the younger guys, it took me five years to get to a point where I wanted to be in college three years ago,” Martin said. “You just have to keep going, put your head forward and keep your focus where it’s meant to be. You can’t use wasted energy. Once you waste your energy, you’re going to be burnt out. So put your focus and energy and time toward football and family and God, or whoever you believe in, and just keep going forward. Don’t look back.”

Lately, Martin’s focus has been fixed in two places: family and football. Last Thursday, he woke at 4 a.m. to his fiancé, Crystal, going into labor. Their second son, Kasyn, was born at the UW Medical Center at 2:19 p.m. Martin returned to practice the next day and starred against Arizona roughly 48 hours later.

It was an appropriate end to a whirlwind week.

“To be able to come out and play football, it was kind of the icing on the cake for the week,” said UW edge coach Eric Schmidt. “We talked before the game and it was like, ‘We’ve got to get two sacks now. You’ve got to get one for each kid.’ He ended up doing it, too. It was a week where if you look back at your life later on and have a little bit of time to reflect he’ll think about what a whirlwind that was and how everything came together.

“He’s a guy that every morning you come to work and you’re excited to see him. It’s why you coach. Guys that are young and full of energy and have a lot of promise and goals and aspirations and things like that, those are the guys you want to help. You want to pour yourself into guys like him and it’s easy to pour yourself into guys like him.”

Still, Martin is not as young as he once was. His priorities have shifted.

He’s motivated to make the most of each forward step.

“Everybody tells me, ‘You’ve got dad strength,’” Martin said with a laugh. “I’m like, ‘No. It’s just that my focus is in different places, you know what I mean?’ When you’re coming in as a young guy your focus is all over the place. You’ve got school and you’re trying to balance that out. You’ve got a girlfriend from high school and you guys are fighting all the time or whatever you’re doing.

“I’ve got a family. When you’ve got a family, when you move, it’s with a purpose.”

Martin’s “dad strength” — if that’s what you call it — is paying dividends on both sides of the ball. The former high school tight end also entered the game on offense last week, blocking for a 1-yard Cameron Davis touchdown plunge.

“I said, ‘We want him,’” recalled UW offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb. “I’ve seen him push our guys the wrong way too many times, so I was like, ‘Why don’t you do that to one of them?’”

The plan was to do it even earlier, as Martin also practiced with the offense prior to the Stanford game. But could his first catch be coming next?

“You know, that’s what I love about it. He hasn’t even brought (the prospect of catching a pass) up,” Grubb said with a smile. “But that’s how you get the ball, too. You don’t overplay your hand.”

Martin — who is one class from a degree in Comparative History of Ideas — has at least five more games to get the ball, whether by catching a pass or sacking the passer. And his fiancé, who he met at the Texas A&M rec center his freshman year, sometimes asks if he considers what life would be like if he signed with Washington in 2018.

But he didn’t get this far by looking back.

Five years, two schools and two sons later, Martin has learned to enjoy the journey.

“I think I enjoy it a lot more now,” he said. “It’s a beautiful struggle at the end of the day.”