In New Jersey’s long and sometimes glorious college basketball history – Bill Bradley and Pete Carril, Seton Hall-Michigan, Rutgers’ unforgettable season – there never has been a chapter quite like this.
Fairleigh Dickinson’s basketball team authored the biggest upset in March Madness history Friday, one day after 15th-seeded Princeton cut down second-seeded Arizona, one year after Saint Peter’s made the greatest Cinderella run in Big Dance history.
The FDU Knights, one year removed from a 4-22 record, runner-up of the Northeast Conference, whose home court seats 1,800, sent Big Ten champion Purdue — and did it with style.
More:They did it! FDU pulls off the upset, stuns mighty Purdue in NCAA Tournament shocker
The Knights’ outhustled, outsmarted and outcoached Purdue, and did it with a backcourt and a head coach who were in Division 2 last season, turning just about every college sports convention on its head. Players unranked, zero stars, by the recruiting services. No NIL to speak of. No alumni collective. No football money.
“We just have faith in what we do,” head coach Tobin Anderson said. “We just did something unbelievable, we shocked the world.”
But FDU had two things going for it: Heart, and March.
Heart. It seemed like Knights got to every loose ball. The smallest team in the country, with an average height of 6-foot-1, grabbed the rebounds that counted. They denied entry passes to 7-foot-4 Zach Edey, the national player of the year, with the kind of zeal that has come to define mid-major basketball in New Jersey.
“We showed people that we can do it with the big dogs,” said Knights guard Sean Moore, who paced his team with 19 points in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio.
In March, the big dogs aren’t in the Big Ten or the Pac-12. They don’t have big-time football programs or giant athletic department payrolls. They’re in Princeton, with a center from England who came out of nowhere and passed rings around Arizona’s team of all-stars. They’re in Jersey City, where Saint Peter’s entire athletic department budget was smaller than Kentucky coach John Calipari’s salary.
And now they’re in Hackensack, where moxie mattered more than money, toughness mattered more than talent, heart mattered more than hype.
New Jersey never has won a Division I NCAA Tournament title in men’s basketball, but the Garden State has achieved the next-best thing – putting the madness in March. Reminding everyone that when the ball goes up in this sport, anyone can win.
More:F-D-Who? Some facts about Fairleigh Dickinson University
Anderson hails from the Midwest, but he’s an honorary New Jerseyan now. After Wednesday’s First Four he told his team, with swagger befitting Bergen County, ‘The more I look at Purdue, the more I think we can beat them.’ A camera picked it up and it went viral.
It was prophecy.
“It would be very easy to come here and say, nice win the other day, and we could have gone away,” Anderson said. “We just kept coming. That’s character.”
That’s Jersey.
“If we played them 100 times, they win 99 times,” Anderson said. “That’s the one.”
Maybe. But it happened for Saint Peter’s. It happened for Princeton. Now it happened for FDU.
Purdue can have the football money, the alumni collectives, the highly touted players. It can have all the material advantages in the world.
You still have to show up and play, and Jersey’s mid-majors are doing that in historic fashion. Purdue never wants to see a Garden State team again. The rest of of the nation can’t get enough. These truly are glory days for the sport in this state.
Jerry Carino has covered the New Jersey sports scene since 1996 and the college basketball beat since 2003. He is an Associated Press Top 25 voter. Contact him at [email protected].