Madness Moments: Fairleigh Dickinson Basketball and Tilting at Windmills
Grambling and Stetson — each making its first NCAA Tournament appearance — Montana State, Wagner, Howard and Longwood are your No. 16 seeds for the 2024 NCAA Tournament.
Facing a No. 1 seed in March Madness doesn’t feel like the Quixotic quest it had for more than three decades when, from 1985 through 2017, every No. 16 that tried failed. Two such upsets in the last five years changed perception from the outside — especially Fairleigh Dickinson’s defeat of Purdue last season.
FDU is not returning to the Big Dance — Wagner represents the Northeast Conference as the league’s perennial 16-seed this time around. The Seahawks will aim to replicate their conference counterpart Knights’ feat of a season ago, winning games in both the First Four and advancing to win in the 1st Round against West Region No. 1 North Carolina.
If they can pull it off, it will kick off the biggest celebration at Wagner since Feech La Manna1 was released from prison.
But for as impossible as a No. 16 seed knocking off a No. 1 long felt, the teams slotted into that unenviable positioning never believed it to be impossible. And they have the Knights to thank.
That knight’s not Don Quixote, who believed in the virtue of his futile endeavors. Nor it is the Fairleigh Dickinson Knights of 2023.
Other Fairleigh Dickinson teams, have inspired hope. And it began with the first NCAA Tournament of the expanded-bracket era.
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Upon release of the first 64-team bracket in March 1985, “nobody cheered and nobody booed,” Michigan’s Gary Grant told the Associated Press of the Wolverines’ placement as No. 1 seed in the Southeast Region.
“We just said, ‘who’s Fairleigh Dickinson?’ and ‘what’s their record?’”
“That’s the problem,” Roy Tarpley added. “I never heard of them.”
Articles previewing the 1st Round matchup such assessments as this via the Dayton Daily News: “It should be no sweat for the Big Ten champions…Coach Bill Frieder’s team is loaded. Michigan has it all — size, speed, quickness and depth.”
Fairleigh Dickinson coach Tom Green didn’t downplay the mismatch, either.
But when the teams tipped off in Dayton on March 16, the Knights jumped ahead of the shell-shocked Wolverines, 32-22, early in the second half, and held a seven-point lead with fewer than nine minutes remaining.
A 25-6 Michigan run, however, flipped the game in the Wolverines’ favor enough that they had a cushion when Fairleigh Dickinson tried to chip away down the stretch.
Michigan won 59-55 — the same score by which the Wolverines lost in the next round to No. 8 seed Villanova — in a game that reflected Fairleigh Dickinson’s ability to dictate the pace.
“I hope these kids are smart enough to figure out how close they came to busing home tonight,” Michigan coach Bill Frieder said in his postgame press conference.
It took another 33 years until UMBC pulled it off, but Fairleigh Dickinson gave future No. 16 seeds reason to believe. The Knights even provided a template that’s been a blueprint for other upsets and near-misses in NCAA Tournament history since, including another 16-vs-1 with Princeton vs. Georgetown in 1989.
To that end, it’s perhaps ironic that the two 16s to score wins over No. 1s did so pushing the pace.
UMBC’s win over Virginia was a case of role reversal, with the favored team employing a slow-down style. The Retrievers forced the Cavaliers out of their element.
Likewise, Fairleigh Dickinson’s 2023 upset of Purdue came as a result of a frenetic defensive approach that negated the Boilermakers’ methodical, interior-focused offensive focus.
The Knights 2023 win was strategically closer to another noteworthy FDU near-miss in 1998.
Although not a No. 16 seed, Fairleigh Dickinson went into the ‘98 Big Dance as a No. 15 when only three had taken down No. 2 seeds in the previous 12 years.
And the Knights faced a UConn team that at 30 wins perhaps deserved a No. 1 seed.
This was essentially the same UConn lineup that won the national championship a year alter, featuring Richard Hamilton and Khalid El-Amin in the backcourt. The duo went off for 58 combined points against Fairleigh Dickinson, and the Huskies needed almost all of them.
That’s because Elijah Allen went off for 43 points on a ridiculous 14-of-17 shooting from the floor — including 6-of-7 from beyond the arc — in what’s still among the best March Madness performances I’ve ever seen.
“That’s Elijah. He’s done that for us all year,” said Knight Rahshon Turner to the Hartford Courant. “I mean, not score that many points, but come up big for us some kind of way.”
Even when falling short of upset immortality, Allen’s performance is the kind of career-defying performance that makes the opportunities ahead of teams like Wagner, Grambling, Stetson or Fairleigh Dickinson before them such a magical part of March.
Actor Robert Loggia, who played Feech in The Sopranos, is a Wagner graduate. s/o Ralph Ventre for that bit of knowledge.