The first coach in a 16-over-1 upset is a top candidate for the UVA Basketball job. The second just got fired at Iona after two mediocre, but not awful, seasons.
Iona cut ties on Monday with Tobin Anderson, who was hired after leading Fairleigh Dickinson to an upset of Purdue in the 2023 NCAA Tournament.
Anderson was 33-34 in two seasons at the school, after replacing Rick Pitino, who left Iona to take the job at St. John’s.
Anderson was only at Fairleigh Dickinson for one season, guiding the Knights to a 21-16 record, and an odd path to an NCAA bid.
Fairleigh Dickinson lost to Merrimack in the 2023 NEC Tournament title game, but because Merrimack was still in the probationary period of its transition from D2 to D1, it wasn’t eligible for the NCAA Tournament, which, yes, is a stupid rule.
That gave Fairleigh Dickinson the most improbable of NCAA berths.
FDU beat Texas Southern in a First Four game to get the game with Purdue, and somehow beat the full-strength Boilermakers, 63-58 – holding Purdue to 33.9 percent shooting, and 5-of-26 on threes.
They did this with a defense that ranked 349th nationally in adjusted efficiency, per KenPom.
KenPom’s final pre-tourney rankings had Fairleigh Dickinson ranked 312th overall; not that it should matter, but it does to me – Ryan Odom’s UMBC squad was 184th in the final KenPom pre-tourney rankings in 2018.
Odom, famously, hung around at UMBC for three more years after the 2018 upset of Virginia, going 51-36 and missing out on the NCAA Tournament in each of the three, before finally taking the leap in 2021 to Utah State, where his teams were 44-25 with one NCAA bid in his two seasons there, ahead of him getting the job at VCU in 2023.
VCU, under Odom, has gone 52-20 in his two years at the school, and is an 11 seed in this year’s NCAA Tournament.
Now Odom is the top candidate to get the top job at UVA, the school that helped make his name back in 2018.
And meanwhile, Tobin Anderson is on the unemployment line.
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Chris Graham
