Michigan State point guard Jeremy Fears thankful to play in March Madness 15 months after shooting

EAST LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Michigan State point guard Jeremy Fears is one of the most thankful players in the NCAA Tournament.

Fears was relegated to watching March Madness last year, recovering from getting shot.

“Grateful,” Fears said. “I’m just happy to be in this position and thank God because I could not be playing basketball.

“Sometimes when I think about it and look back, it’s crazy that it actually happened. Now, I’m back and playing. It just seems like a bump in the road, basically over a year ago.”

Fears had a 3-hour surgery to remove a bullet from his left thigh, cutting short his freshman season. He has bounced back well enough to become a key player for the second-seeded Spartans, who will play 15th-seeded Bryant on Friday night in Cleveland.

“He’s playing his best basketball, by far, both with the ball and with his voice and with his intelligence,” Michigan State coach Tom Izzo said Tuesday. “The last four or five games, he’s made some incredible adjustments and is looking to be a point guard that really gets people involved.

“When you come off the injury he had and you’re out seven or eight months, it doesn’t come back immediately.”

Fears went back home to Joliet, Illinois, for holiday break as a freshman while his parents were on a recruiting trip with his brother, Jeremiah, who is a freshman star at Oklahoma.

While hanging out with friends on Dec. 23, 2023, Jeremy Fears and a 19-year-old woman were shot by a male with a handgun after the man entered a residence and opened fire before fleeing.

Fears survived the scare, but his freshman season was over. He was limited to 12 games, leading to the NCAA granting him a redshirt, and averaged 3.5 points and 3.3 assists.

This season, especially lately, Fears has looked more like the five-star recruit he was coming out of high school.

Fears averaged 7.4 points and 5.5 assists and his scoring production and defensive pressure have picked up in recent games.

He matched a career high with 14 points in his last game, a three-point loss to Wisconsin in the Big Ten Tournament semifinals which ended with the ball getting knocked out his hands as he attempted to shoot a long 3-pointer.

Fears scored 14 points two weeks ago against Iowa, and in the following two games he combined for 18 points, 11 assists and three steals.

“He’s gotten better as the year has gone on,” Izzo said.

His improvement has helped the Spartans become one of the surprises of college basketball this season.

They were unranked for the first month of the season and ended up winning the 18-game Big Ten championship by three games, becoming the eighth-ranked team in the AP Top 25 and earning a high seed in Izzo’s 27th consecutive NCAA Tournament.

Fears, though, is not satisfied.

“We haven’t really done anything yet,” he said. “We want to win the whole thing.”

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