Tag: fairleigh dickinson knights

Fairleigh Dickinson is what makes March Madness so riveting

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Pure, unadulterated joy, entertainment and — oh yes, don’t forget this — exhilarating and thrilling surprise. 

That is what Fairleigh Dickinson brought to the Big Dance, playing with three players who were on a Division II team last year and their former D-II coach on Friday night against one of the bluest of blue bloods of the NCAA Tournament. 

The Knights, seeded 16th in the East Region, were two days removed from advancing to the bracket of 64 via a play-in First Four win and the smallest team in Division I basketball this season, but they stood tall against the biggest team in the land, No. 1 seed Purdue. 

FDU did everything it came to do on a magical night, delivering a stunning 63-58 first-round victory over Purdue in a quintessential David-vs.-Goliath matchup in front of a sellout crowd at Nationwide Arena, earning a Round of 32 matchup with Florida Atlantic on Sunday. 

Most of the people in the building had little idea what FDU was or where it’s from. By midway through the second half, however, chants of “FDU! FDU! FDU!’’ were raining down onto the hardwood, and they could be heard all the way back to North Jersey. 

The likes of those 40 minutes are why everyone is riveted to March Madness every year. We can’t take our eyes off it, because nights like the Knights’ are always possible. 

“What a night,’’ FDU coach Tobin Anderson said afterward, still breathless. “Incredible win for us. Incredible win for our program, our school. Hard to put it in words right now. It just happened, right?’’ 


Fairleigh Dickinson Knights forward Jo’el Emanuel (13) celebrates defeating the Purdue Boilermakers.
USA TODAY Sports

Oh, it happened. It was real and it was spectacular. 

“We showed why we belong here,’’ FDU’s 5-foot-8 guard Demetre Roberts, one of the three players Anderson brought with him from Rockland County’s St. Thomas Aquinas College, said after scoring 12 points and dishing out four assists. 

“I can’t even explain it,’’ said forward Sean Moore, another of the players Anderson brought to FDU. “I’m shocked right now. I can’t believe it. It’s crazy. But it feels amazing.’’ 


The New York Post back page for Saturday, March 18, 2023.
The New York Post back page for Saturday, March 18, 2023.

Amazing is what Moore, a native of suburban Columbus who had family in the double digits watching from the stands, delivered. He led the Knights with 19 points, the biggest of which came on a 3-pointer from the top of the key to give FDU a 61-56 lead with 1:03 remaining. 

“Our goal is to hang around,’’ Anderson said before the game. “Hopefully you get to a point where it’s a four-minute game, six-minute game, eight-minute game, and you have a chance.’’ 

This is exactly how FDU and Anderson, who just 10 months ago took over a team that went 4-22 last season, did it. They followed the blueprint right down to the final detail. 


Sean Moore #11 of the Fairleigh Dickinson Knights celebrates with the team after beating the Purdue Boilermakers.
Getty Images

With eight minutes remaining, they led 52-49. With six minutes remaining, they led 54-53. With two minutes remaining, they led 56-53. 

The Knights (21-15), who were 25-point underdogs, led for 25:42 of the game, compared to just 11:36 for Purdue (29-6). 

The FDU win was only the second time in NCAA Tournament history a No. 16 seed upset a No. 1 seed, after UMBC beat Virgnia in 2018. Sixteenth seeds are now 2-150 all-time against No. 1 seeds since the men’s tournament expanded to 64 teams. 

Fairleigh Dickinson didn’t even win the NEC Tournament, losing to Merrimack by one point in the title game. Merrimack, however, couldn’t play in the NCAA tourney because it’s still completing its four-year transition from Division II. 

After beating Purdue, Anderson said he had people sending him “Miracle hockey speeches and Hoosier speeches all day long’’ to deliver to his team. He didn’t need those. He actually shows his players videos before games as motivational tools, often related to boxing. Before the game Friday, he had something different in mind. 

“Today, they showed us a video about a lion,’’ said 6-6 forward Ansley Almonor, who did an amazing job defending Purdue’s 7-4 All-American center Zach Edey, who finished with 21 points and 15 rebounds, but didn’t attempt a shot in the final nine minutes. “What makes a lion the king of the jungle? It’s not his speed, it’s not his smarts, it’s just his mentality. We needed to have a lion’s mentality to go out there and be the king of the jungle, go out there and be the better team. And that’s what we did.’’ 


Anderson had a feeling his team’s pressing style would make Purdue uncomfortable, and he was spot on. 

“My dad was a big boxing fan,’’ he said. “Styles make fights. And our style, I thought, hurt them a little bit.’’ 

Before the game, Purdue coach Matt Painter was transparent when asked what his players had learned from their devastating loss to No. 15 seed Saint Peter’s in the 2022 Sweet 16. 

“That Saint Peter’s played harder than we did,’’ Painter said. 

Purdue played hard Friday night. Here’s the thing, though: It’s impossible to imagine any team playing harder than FDU did. 

“They earned it, they played better than we did, they coached better than we did and we have to sit in it, we gotta to face it,’’ Painter said. 

“I think people see now that we do belong’’ Anderson said. “Here’s the thing: We’re getting better, too. We’re definitely getting better. And that’s an exciting thing.’’

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Coach dispels DI credo with Fairleigh Dickinson in March Madness

DAYTON, Ohio — None of this was thought to be possible, not even by the most optimistic of souls: Fairleigh Dickinson will be playing in the NCAA Tournament’s play-in game Wednesday night against Texas Southern for the right to play No. 1 seed Purdue.

Flash back to 10 ½ months ago, when FDU hired Tobin Anderson on May 3 to be the university’s new head basketball coach. Anderson conducted an emergency practice that night. He needed to know what he had to work with. And what he witnessed was sobering.

Anderson had built St. Thomas Aquinas in Sparkill up in Rockland County into a perennial Division II power with a 209-62 record across nine seasons. At FDU, he took over a program that not only had won just four games in 2022, but also had only five returning scholarship players remaining on the roster, none of whom was a starter last year.

Now Anderson and FDU (19-15) have a role in March Madness with a game to play at 6:40 p.m. Wednesday.

“We had a practice the night I got the job, and I left that practice thinking to myself, ‘Oh my God, this is going to take us four or five years to be competitive,’ ” Anderson told The Post. “I knew I was stepping into a tough situation, but that practice really opened my eyes that this was going to be a real, real long process.

“We’d lost our best players and the guys that were back had all been role players. The biggest thing we had to figure out was how we were going to reconfigure the roster in a short amount of time.”


Fairleigh Dickinson head coach Tobin Anderson.
AP

Because Anderson had been hired so late in the process, the NCAA transfer portal essentially had been picked clean of talent, leaving him without a lot of choices to recruit for his program on short notice.

Anderson first went with what he knew best — his own players from St. Thomas Aquinas. He brought with him fifth-year senior guards Demetre Roberts and Grant Singleton, as well as Sean Moore.

Anderson’s FDU roster this season was a hodgepodge group consisting of four players from his Division II Aquinas team, three junior college recruits, three freshmen and one walk-on, Brayden Reynolds.

“It was like putting together a puzzle on the fly,” Anderson said. “And we had to get this done in a short amount of time.”

A year removed from the Knights’ 4-22 finish, the second-worst in the program’s 58-year history, here we are.

The unlikely FDU season and the job Anderson has done are proof that coaches who’ve won a lot of games on one level can do it on the next level, too. Anderson is living proof that Division I schools shouldn’t turn up their noses at coaches who’ve had success at lower levels of the game.

More often than not, winners win no matter the level.

“It was hard to get Division I [athletic directors] to hire Division II head coaches,” Anderson said. “They just don’t want to do it.”

Betting on College Basketball?

That created a chip on Anderson’s shoulder that matches the chip on his players’ shoulders. There’s an NCAA metric that measures the average height of players from all schools, and FDU is the shortest team in Division I.


Fairleigh Dickinson players react as their school is announced for the NCAA tournament on Sunday, March 12, 2023.
Bill Kostroun for NY Post

Roberts is 5-foot-8 and leads the team in scoring with 16.7 points per game. Singleton is 5-9 and is the second-leading scorer with 14.3 points per game.

“Coaches who have won, there’s a reason they’ve won, you know?” Anderson said. “So, I’d be lying to say there isn’t a chip on shoulder.”

Of course, Anderson is keeping tabs on the schools that snubbed him.


Fairleigh Dickinson guard Brayden Reynolds (24) drives past Merrimack forward Jordan Minor (22) in the NEC title game.
AP

“I can’t help but do that.” he said. “I don’t say names, but there’s definitely a little bit of that going on. There are a lot of schools that wouldn’t give me the time of day that have been losing for the last seven or eight years.”

There, of course, is more work to be done, but this remarkable season has not been lost on Anderson.

“My wife I and were home after the [NCAA] selection show and we said to ourselves, ‘Who would have thought this?’ ” he said. “Ten months ago, there’s just no way this was even on the radar of us having a chance to go. I thought it’d be great to go to FDU and at some point, after three or four years, take the team to the NCAA Tournament.

“But to do it in the first year with all the challenges … I’ve been a head coach for 21 years and this is one of the most incredible seasons of all because we never saw this coming.”

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