The March Tales Of FDU And St. Francis (NY) Show The Narrow Line Between Cinderella And Extinction

The question about what Tobin Anderson was doing the morning of Mar. 1— preparing for Fairleigh Dickinson’s first-round Northeast Conference tournament game against St. Francis (NY) — wasn’t complete when Anderson began nodding.

“If you lose that game…” the questioner said.

“Done,” Anderson said.

Perhaps a loss for Fairleigh Dickinson — or, as the school in Teaneck, New Jersey is better known as now, FDU — to St. Francis wouldn’t have derailed Anderson’s path to Iona, where he was named the successor to Rick Pitino as the school’s men’s basketball coach last Wednesday morning.

But the hiring of Anderson by Iona after FDU’s historic run — in case you’ve been on Mars the last two-plus weeks, the Knights beat Texas Southern in a First Four game pitting a pair of no. 16 seeds on Mar. 15, authored the biggest upset in NCAA Tournament history by knocking off top-seeded Purdue two days later and led Final Four-bound Florida Atlantic in the second half of a 78-70 loss on Mar. 19— served as a fascinating bookend to coaching searches bookending the first three years of the pandemic era as well as a reminder of how thin the line is for low majors between becoming America’s Cinderella and doing away with sports entirely.

Anderson actually interviewed for Pitino’s job before Pitino three years ago following the retirement of Tim Cluess, whose pre-Iona resume is remarkably similar to the one Anderson constructed. Cluess won more than 78 percent of his games at Suffolk Community College and Division II C.W. Post on Long Island before being hired at the age of 51 in the spring of 2010 and directing the Gaels to six NCAA berths in nine seasons.

Anderson, who began his head coaching career with 12 seasons at Division III Hamilton and Clarkson, was 167-55 (a winning percentage of .752) in 10 seasons at at Division II St. Thomas Aquinas in Sparkill, N.Y. when he interviewed with Iona on Mar. 10, 2020 — hours after Iona president Seamus Carey closed the campus over concerns about the coronavirus cases in New Rochelle.

“He said ‘I don’t know if it’s the right decision,’” Anderson said. “We had lunch, talked and that night I went home and they (began cancelling) all the tournaments. It happened so fast.”

On Mar. 14, 2020 — the Saturday before the Selection Sunday that wasn’t — Iona made the lone non-COVID sports-related news of the day by hiring Pitino, who’d spent the previous two seasons coaching professionally in Greece following his firing by Louisville after a series of scandals.

Three years and three days later, Pitino coached his final game at Iona — an 87-73 loss to another Final Four-bound team, Connecticut, in the first round of the NCAA Tournament — hours before FDU shocked Purdue.

By Mar. 21, Pitino, fresh from the press conference introducing him as the new head coach at St. John’s, was calling Anderson, who’d agreed to become Iona’s new coach earlier in the day after one season at FDU and is still amused at the idea of the world’s best-known coaches recognizing him.

“Bill Belichick reached out to me — fellow Wesleyan graduate,” said Anderson, a 1996 graduate of the school in Middletown, CT. “I told the story before: I’m walking down the hall after we beat Purdue. Tom Izzo is walking ahead of me. I said ‘Hey coach. Tobin.’ And he’s like ‘I know who the blank you are! I watched you, you just kicked Purdue’s (rear end).’

“So yeah, life’s changed, but it’s a good thing, It’s all good. I mean, my wife and I were laughing. We’re just the same crazy, corny people we’ve always been.”

Anderson knows things could have been much different. Like most of his non-Division I peers — and most coaches working at non-power conference schools — he tried not to think about the worst-case scenario as the pandemic took hold and the very real possibility of an indefinite shutdown of college athletics loomed.

Sports returned in sporadic at best fashion during the 2020-21 school year — Anderson’s penultimate team at St. Thomas Aquinas went 14-2 while playing all its games in February and March — but the aftereffects of the pandemic continue reverberating.

The start of FDU’s sensational surge into the spotlight — an 83-75 win over St. Francis — also marked the last men’s basketball game for the Terriers. The Brooklyn school which announced Mar. 20 — barely 12 hours after the Knights’ NCAA Tournament run ended — it would cut all sports at the end of the school year.

And the Cinderella run by FDU came less than a year after the school’s commitment to Division I was questioned. While FDU added men’s volleyball and women’s lacrosse for the 2021-22 season in hopes of boosting enrollment and revenue, the school also reduced the number of assistant coaches on the men’s and women’s basketball teams from three to two.

Both staffs had three assistants throughout a 2022-23 season— and the success of the men’s basketball team should provide FDU a potentially program-saving boost enjoyed by previous first-weekend Cinderellas such as Florida Gulf Coast and UMBC.

“I feel for St Francis — I feel for their players, their coaches,” Anderson said. “That’s a tough situation, obviously. And all those schools at that level, since the pandemic, had had some issues.

“I’m happy (with) what we did at FDU, because I think we might have done some things to help the school with exposure, with some attention that might take the school to a new level. I think everybody sees that now, what, especially, the NCAA Tournament can do. We’ve got arenas chanting ‘F-D-U.’ That’s an awesome thing.”