Wichita State basketball ends its Beale Street blues with Memphis road win
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Wichita State snapped a seven-game road skid at Memphis with an 88-82 win.
- Shockers used 44-27 rebounding edge and turned 18 offensive rebounds into 19 points.
- Win moved Wichita State to 19-10, 11-5 in AAC and kept the Shockers tied with Tulsa.
For years, FedExForum has been a house of horrors for Wichita State.
Since Penny Hardaway took over at Memphis, the Shockers had dropped seven straight road games to the Tigers by an average of 11.9 points — a skid that had also helped prevent the Shockers from ever completing a season sweep of Memphis since joining the American Conference.
That’s what made Thursday night’s 88-82 win, punctuated by another cold-blooded Kenyon Giles’ 3, feel so significant.
WSU not only exorcized a road demon, but did it in a game it had to have. The Shockers (19-10, 11-5 American) now have their first four-game winning streak of the season and stayed tied with Tulsa for second place in the league standings. As it stands, WSU owns the tiebreaker for the coveted triple-bye into the conference tournament semifinals.
Memphis (12-16, 7-8 American) lost its fifth straight game, the longest losing streak in the program since 1999-00. WSU improved to 5-3 on the road in conference play with three straight wins away from Koch Arena.
“It’s a great feeling when you go on the road and beat a team in front of their fans,” WSU senior Karon Boyd said. “You see the energy at the start of the game, they come out rah-rah and everyone is hype, then we start getting buckets, stopping them and get a dub and then the whole place goes quiet. We’re just out there having fun.”
Giles finished with 22 points on 9-of-23 shooting and delivered the defining shot of the night, but the win was built on grit, rebounding and composure in the kinds of moments that have so often gone against the Shockers in Memphis.
“We knew this team likes to get rowdy, so we couldn’t stoop down to that level,” Giles said. “We knew adversity was going to come, so we just had to stay calm and play our game and weather the storm. That’s what we did to get the win.”
Memphis shot 52% from the field, a number that usually would have been enough to win at home. But WSU dominated the glass, 44-27, and turned 18 offensive rebounds into 19 second-chance points. WSU had five scorers in double figures, as Will Berg and Emmanuel Okorafor combined for 23 points and 18 rebounds from the center position and Karon Boyd added 14 points, seven rebounds and five assists.
And when it came time to make pressure free throws, a team that had struggled there for most of the last two months found a way.
WSU entered the game shooting just under 68% from the foul line as a team, one of the worst marks in the country. On Thursday, the Shockers went 26 of 33 (78.8%) at the stripe. Boyd, a 61% foul shooter, made 8 of 11 and all four of his tries in the final two minutes, while Dillon Battie, who was a 48% foul shooter, went 6 of 7 and Berg, a 64% shooter, made all six of his attempts.
The final three minutes turned into a thriller with both teams trading big plays and the lead changing hands six times. Quante Berry put Memphis up 78-77 with 2:53 left, the Tigers’ first lead since midway through the first half, but T.J. Williams scored on a layup to put WSU back in front.
When Memphis’ Zach Davis responded inside to continue the seesaw, Boyd calmly stepped to the line and made both free throws for an 81-80 lead. Davis answered again to put Memphis back ahead 82-81 with 1:43 left, but Boyd was fouled again and made both free throws again to give WSU an 83-82 lead.
“We knew they were going to counterpunch,” Mills said. “I don’t think our guys ever hung their heads about it. When you have a team that believes in themselves and believe in each other, they have the right mentality that they’re going to find a way. There were some storms we had to weather, but you saw that belief maintained through the whole process.”
After both teams traded points for five straight possessions, Memphis blinked first. The Tigers came up empty on their next possession and WSU funneled the ball to Giles, exactly who WSU wanted handling the moment. With the shot clock winding down and a double team coming, Giles pulled up from deep and drilled a 3-pointer for a four-point lead with 21 seconds left.
Another Memphis miss followed and Dre Kindell finished an easy runout to put the final touches on a dramatic road win that felt like both a breakthrough and a survival act.
Part of the reason why WSU held a lead for 31-plus minutes was because the team turned in one of its most dominant performances on the glass all season in the first half. Despite shooting just 27.5% (11 of 40) from the field, WSU took a 40-35 lead and scored 1.18 points per possession thanks to a staggering 17 offensive rebounds that produced 17 second-chance points.
“(Okorafor) was great off the bat and he really set the tone for the game,” Berg said. “I just came in and tried to do the same thing. I think our physicality and crashing the boards helped everybody else do their jobs.”
Berg and Okorafor set the tone, combining for 10 offensive rebounds and 19 first-half points as Memphis struggled to keep either big man off the boards. WSU never really found a rhythm offensively in the first half, but kept creating second chances and cashing in at the line.
“When you go against a guy that is bigger than you, you’ve got to fight them,” Memphis coach Penny Hardaway said. “We understood what the task was going to be. We’ve just been trying to figure this out all year with rebounding. We’ve got to get guys to hit, box out and go get it. We were prepared to box out, we just didn’t do a good job.”
For a while in the second half, it looked like the Shockers might turn that ugly-but-effective formula into a relatively comfortable road win.
WSU steadily pushed the lead to 57-44 in the first six minutes after halftime, capped by a Giles 3-pointer. But as WSU fans know from years of trips to Memphis, nothing is ever easy in this building.
The Tigers ripped off a 12-2 run in less than two minutes to cut the deficit to 59-56 with 12 minutes left and from there on out, it was a back-and-forth affair that WSU had to make several key plays to pull out the win.
The Shockers savored their first four-game winning streak of the season, a point that Mills tried to emphasize beforehand after WSU had played poorly in road losses to Boise State, Charlotte and Tulsa that halted previous attempts at a four-game winning streak.
“We talked about how we needed to dominate possessions and understand the value of possessions,” Mills said. “We needed to dominate effort plays and I thought we did that. It sure feels good to get four in a row.”
This story was originally published February 26, 2026 at 10:44 PM.
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