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COLUMBUS, Ohio — With just over three minutes remaining Friday, Fairleigh Dickinson’s Sean Moore snatched a ricocheted rebound away from Purdue’s Zach Edey, the 6-foot-4 forward beating the 7-foot-4 center and likely Naismith Trophy winner to the loose ball.
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It maintained a one-point lead for the No. 16 seed Knights. Moore unleashed a howl, and the crowd of disparate fan bases responded in kind, spontaneously bandying together as synchronized chants of “F-D-U” washed over the stunned and silent faces of the Purdue faithful.
Two minutes of game time later, it was Moore who drained a pick-and-pop 3-pointer at the top of the key to push the lead to five, giving him a team-leading 19 points in his hometown of Columbus, the city where he was born and raised. Then he swatted a Purdue layup off the backboard in the closing seconds, helping Fairleigh Dickinson clinch an improbable and incredible 63-58 upset over the top-seed Boilermakers.
“What a night. Incredible win for us. Incredible win for our program, our school. Hard to put it in words right now,” said FDU first-year head coach Tobin Anderson. “For us to beat them tonight, in this environment, it was just an incredible win for us … If we played them 100 times, they’d probably beat us 99 times. But tonight’s the one time we had to be unique, to be unorthodox. We had to make it tough on them, just be different.”
FDU became just the second No. 16 seed to knock off a No. 1 in NCAA Tournament history, joining UMBC’s upset of Virginia in 2018. No. 16 seeds are now 2-151 all-time in the round of 64, yet in a number of ways, FDU’s victory is still unprecedented.
The Knights only made the NCAA Tournament on a technicality of sorts, finishing second to Merrimack in the Northeast Conference regular-season standings and then losing out to it again in the NEC tournament finals. But because Merrimack is in the fourth and final year of the required transition period from Division II to Division I, NCAA rules prohibited the Warriors from playing in the NCAA Tournament, ceding the bid to FDU. The Knights were the final team on the selection committee’s seed list, a three-point underdog to Texas Southern in the First Four in Dayton on Wednesday before winning 84-61 and making its way to Columbus to be a 23-point ‘dog to Purdue.
“We were a little irritated. We all have a chip on our shoulder. People say we shouldn’t be here, we shouldn’t be in the tournament, all that kind of stuff we have to listen to,” said Anderson. “We want to prove people wrong.”
🎙️ | @andersontobin pic.twitter.com/jXSEQhDnDL
— FDU Men’s Basketball (@FDUKnightsMBB) March 18, 2023
FDU secured the cliched glass slipper in the process, playing in its first NCAA Tournament since 2019 and seventh all-time for the private, sea-grant university in Teaneck, New Jersey. Regardless of the title-less circumstances that put the Knights in the field, this season represented a remarkable turnaround for the program, which won all of four games in 2021-22. In May, the program hired Anderson, who previously went 209-62 in 10 seasons at Division II St. Thomas Aquinas in Sparkill, New York.
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The head coach wasn’t the only one ready to make a leap to Division I. Moore and fifth-year guards Demetre Roberts and Grant Singleton followed their head coach from St. Thomas Aquinas to FDU this past offseason. Anderson didn’t promise them anything beyond the chance to play D1 ball and build a program, but that was enough to make Singleton reconsider ending his college career.
“I got one more chance,” Singleton said, “and I made the most of it.”
All three of them did, quickly helping to set a standard for the Knights. A press-heavy team, Roberts and Singleton set the defensive tone and lead the Knights in scoring at 16.5 and 14.1 points a game, respectively. (On Friday, Roberts had 12 and Singleton had eight.) Moore, a reliable junior who averaged 6.7 points this season, erupted for a career-high in front of roughly 20 family and friends.
“This was meant. This is a blessing,” said Shanika Tyler, Moore’s mother, shortly after embracing her son from the front row of the Nationwide Arena stands. “I know Sean’s a good player. I know he had a goal today to help make history, especially coming home to Columbus. When he scored the first five points (of the game), I knew it. I knew it was over.”
Before this squad could revel in its bracket-busting glory, however, there had to be a transition period. In the summer, the group pushed each other to the brink in workouts, and it wasn’t until they stepped on the floor for the season-opener against Loyola Chicago that things started to jell. The 88-82 overtime loss wasn’t the way they wanted to begin the season, but it was a glimpse at what could be.
“We lost a tough one, but we all knew we could compete at the highest level,” Moore said.
Despite the ups and downs of the season, which included a 29-point loss to Richmond followed by an 11-point loss to Queens, FDU’S roster was built with experience in mind. With eight upperclassmen, the Knights felt confident in their ability to overcome any madness March could throw at them. When Purdue went on an 11-0 run to take a 47-41 lead with 11:41 remaining, no one flinched. Facing the type of momentum shift where higher-seeded teams tend to figure it out and take control, the Knights answered right back, ripping off an 8-0 run of their own.
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“We’ve been there before,” said junior guard Joe Munden Jr. “We’ve seen almost every situation before, and we don’t get rattled.”
Anderson leans supportive in his on-court posture, as opposed to scolding players for mistakes. Each time he subbed someone off, he would smile and pat them on the back or on the head, and on multiple occasions he rushed out to meet them when coming off the floor for timeouts. Anderson constructed this team for this moment. Not to stun top-seeded Purdue in the NCAA Tournament, necessarily, but to stay calm in the face of adversity and adopt the persona of their coach.
“He gives us so much confidence and a lot of room to go out there and make plays,” Munden Jr. said. “It’s so easy to play for a guy like that.”
An Iowa native, Anderson had a successful playing career of his own. He scored 1,129 points for Division III Wesleyan, finishing 11th on the school’s all-time scoring list. Yet it was a boxing analogy inspired by his father that he used to describe this upset.
“Styles make fights,” he said. “And our style, I thought, hurt them a little bit. I thought the press, the up-tempo, the speed, the quickness and our guys, they defended their tails off.”
The never-ending pressure and full-court traps by FDU’s defense rattled Purdue early and often. The Boilermakers turned the ball over 16 times, well above their season average, leading directly to 15 points by the Knights. FDU, which entered the game with one of the worst adjusted defensive efficiency ratings in college basketball — 357 out of 363 — limited Purdue to just 5-of-26 shooting from 3-point range and 36 percent overall, which was enough to offset the Knights’ offense converting just 39 percent from the field.
Full-court pressure is a key aspect of Anderson’s defensive scheme, but it’s not FDU’s entire identity. Whether the team went zone or man-to-man, FDU played with a swarming tenacity that never allowed Edey to get in a groove or his teammates to get comfortable feeding him the ball. He had to battle for every one of his 21 points and 15 rebounds.
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“A lot of times they would have one dude guarding from behind and one dude basically sitting in my lap,” Edey said. “They were full-fronting the entire game. Made it very hard to get catches.”
The pregame storyline was almost too on the nose: Purdue, the tallest team in the tournament in terms of average player height, facing FDU, the shortest in Division I. At 6-foot-6, Ansley Almonor was the tallest player to see action for the Knights. But Anderson needed his players to understand the game would be decided by more than height and wingspan. So before the team took the floor on Friday, he showed them a video of a lion fighting an elephant, depicting why the smaller lion is considered the king of the jungle.
“It’s purely a mentality,” Almonor said.
“We knew we had to have that type of mentality coming into the game. We have heart,” said guard Brayden Reynolds. “It’s heart over height and it spoke volumes today.”
The Boilermakers couldn’t handle FDU’s speed and aggression on either end of the floor, with Purdue’s freshman backcourt of Braden Smith and Fletcher Loyer combining for 10 of the team’s 16 turnovers. On the other end, the Boilermakers struggled to keep FDU’s guards in front of them, and the Knights made some contested shots when they had to.
Anderson made some headlines two days earlier for a different video. Following the team’s First Four win over Texas Southern on Wednesday, CBS cameras recorded him telling his players in the locker room: “The more I watch Purdue, the more I think we can beat them.”
Even after the win on Friday, Anderson admitted he wished the cameras hadn’t been there for that moment. He had no intention of upsetting or disrespecting Purdue, but he’s not apologizing for what he said, either.
“That’s got to be the message,” Anderson said. “We’re trying to win the next game. We just can’t be happy to be here. The guys gotta believe.”
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If there were any doubts when the players arrived at Nationwide Arena, Reynolds didn’t allow them to linger for too long, the freshman hype man screaming “We belong!” on repeat. All the chatter about making the tournament on a technicality and being the shortest team in the country and the outsize point spread had purposefully made its way to the players.
“We like people hating on us because it just fuels us for the next one,” Reynolds said. “We are going to make people believe, like tonight. If you don’t believe in us, you better start believing, because we can play.”
Friday night proved as much. It served as an eye-opening moment for the Northeast Conference as well, with FDU earning the league’s first round-of-64 victory by a men’s basketball member.
“This team just has this aura about them,” NEC commissioner Noreen Morris told The Athletic. “They have this, what’s the word — I don’t know, they have just it. They truly believed, right? There’s something about this team and this coach. They have the fabric and the foundation. I’m just speechless.”
Both of FDU’s wins thus far will have a significant, tangible impact on the NEC moving forward, accumulating three NCAA Tournament “units” for the three games FDU is guaranteed to play this postseason. Each unit brings roughly $2 million in revenue to the NEC over the course of six years, and for a conference with an annual budget of $4 million for all of its 24 men’s and women’s sports, that’s some serious coin. Morris recognizes that, and knows it will need to be put to good use. But still basking in the postgame glow, she couldn’t help but focus on the more romantic, intangible side of the equation.
“Obviously the money is huge, but I would say the reputational benefit of this win is priceless,” said Morris, who added that she packed three FDU outfits for her multi-stop trip to Dayton and Columbus. “We’re not the highest-rated recruits, we’re not the tallest — clearly, because this is the shortest team in America. But the brand of basketball we play is gritty, it’s hard, it’s tenacious. For us to finally get over the hump and get that respect nationally means the world to the conference.”
More than 20 minutes after the final buzzer sounded and the on-court euphoria subsided, the Knights were back in the locker room, similarly soaking it in. There were no cameras, so no viral videos this time. Anderson wasn’t even in there, still answering questions from the media. It was just the players. One of them suggested they take a group picture. As they huddled together, the photographer instructed the group: “Say, ‘We just took down the No. 1 seed!’” They repeated it verbatim before breaking out into a frenzy.
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As the minutes ticked on, some sat in their lockers still in awe, trying to respond to as many texts and calls as possible. Others re-lived moments of the game with their teammates, showing off videos tagged to them on social media. It was a special, intimate, indelible scene — the stuff core memories are made of. No coaches. No cameras. Just the players who came together for a collective goal: to build Fairleigh Dickinson into a winner. To prove they belong.
With the locker room now quieted down, that realization seemed to finally dawn on Moore, the hometown kid and unexpected hero on the unlikeliest of NCAA Tournament darlings.
“S—,” said Moore, taking it all in. “We did that today.”
(Top photo of FDU’s Sean Moore: Dylan Buell / Getty Images)