The men’s basketball team at Fairleigh Dickinson University, a private commuter school with a campus in Teaneck, N.J., went 4-22 last season. Three of its best players and its coach were competing in Division II. And the Knights, playing in the Northeast Conference, didn’t even win their conference tournament, a title they normally would have needed to make the N.C.A.A. tournament.
And yet, Fairleigh Dickinson became just the second No. 16 seed ever to topple a 1 in the men’s tournament, by taking down Purdue, 63-58, in the first round on Friday. (In 2018, top-seeded Virginia lost to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. In the women’s tournament, No. 16 seed Harvard beat No. 1 Stanford in 1998.)
“I love our guys — they’re tough, they’re gritty, the play their tails off,” Fairleigh Dickinson’s first-year coach, Tobin Anderson, said after the win. “That’s unbelievable. We just shocked the world, and it couldn’t happen to a better bunch of guys, a better bunch of fans, my family, the whole thing.”
So, who are these guys, and how big a deal is this?
This year’s team is relatively new.
After nine years at St. Thomas Aquinas College, a Division II team in Sparkill, N.Y., Anderson was hired at Fairleigh Dickinson, a school of fewer than 8,000…
