Finally, March: FDU women win 18th straight, men earn No. 4 seed
FDU will always have a special association with the month of March. Both the men and women are getting ready to host NEC tournament games.
HACKENSACK – The FDU campus and the Bogota Savings Bank Center are always going to have a special association with the month of March, ever since the men’s team became the second No. 16 seed to defeat a No. 1 in NCAA Tournament history two years ago.
This year, both the men and women will host Northeast Conference tournament games under this gym’s unique geometrical ceiling, as the men were locked into the No. 4 seed after Saturday’s loss to Long Island and the women tied up the regular-season championship more than a week ago.
On the women’s side, FDU went to Long Island and notched a 73-46 win Saturday to improve to 25-3 (15-0 NEC). While the men’s regular season wrapped up Saturday, there’s one game to go for the women.
More to the point, it marked FDU’s 18th straight win, tied for the fifth-longest streak in the country. I saw FDU play at Rutgers on Dec. 11, a game where the Knights were outmatched by Kiyomi McMiller, Destiny Adams and Chyna Cornwell. That was the last time this team lost. For context, the first 12-team College Football Playoff was nine days away and Jim Larranaga hadn’t stepped down at Miami yet.
Coach Stephanie Gaitley has brought Richmond, Saint Joseph’s and Fordham to the NCAA Tournament and will try to do the same for FDU in her second year here. The program has never made an NCAA Tournament appearance.
I was glad to see PIX 11 recently highlighted the team in a news feature, as it’s not easy to get a small-school basketball program (men or women) on TV.
“People don’t realize, only a small portion is X’s and O’s obviously, but a big portion is caring about your kids, getting to know your kids, understanding what they’re going through on and off the court and being there for them,” Gaitley told PIX 11. “So I think they respect that and they understand that we put them as a person first.”
FDU is more than just the best team in a weak conference. Going by BartTorvik.com’s T-Rank for women’s hoops, here are some teams rated lower than FDU’s No. 186: half the Ivy League, a .500 Monmouth group and Xavier of the Big East. FDU is just six spots below another power-conference team, Houston.
So what drives FDU’s success? The Knights do basically everything well, especially relative to their competition. They take care of the ball (32nd nationally in turnover percentage), rebound well at both ends, rank 72nd in 3-point shooting and make more than 75% of their free throws. The first two are ball control stats that add up to more time of possession, which they maximize with one of the slowest tempos in the sport (359th of 362 teams), yet their efficiency helps them build leads quickly.
One more thing that jumps off the Torvik team page is a defensive free throw rate under 20, ranking 12th in the country. The Knights commit very few fouls per game compared to the average, a massive edge in a sport where the officiating can be unpredictable.
FDU’s leading scorer is Ava Renninger, but the player to know is Teneisia Brown, who leads the NEC in both rebounding (9.8 per game) and field goal shooting (51.1%), including 52.9% in league games. Not to brag, but at the start of last season I underlined her as someone to watch in Jersey college hoops; now she’s widely considered the NEC Player of the Year favorite.
“We know we are the targets, but we have a target,” Brown told PIX 11. “We’re not settling, still coming in hungry, still attacking every game how we would attack the previous games before we won the title. And if anyone wants to beat us, they’re going to have to work to beat us.”
FDU men stuck in the middle
As for the men, the Knights will host No. 5 seed Stonehill on Wednesday in the NEC quarterfinals, the only home game they’re guaranteed.
Saturday’s game against Long Island was one final chance for FDU to make something positive happen heading into the postseason. The 74-55 final score obscures how the game got to that point – it was a noticeably balanced game with no lead greater than six on either side until the final seven minutes.
“They went zone, I don’t think we handled that terribly well,” coach Jack Castleberry told me postgame. “We had problems turning the ball over and keeping them off the glass the entire game. Eventually that was going to add up. We missed some shots that we typically make, we missed some layups that we typically make and that combination altogether down stretch, tough to deal with.”
The killer was that FDU shot a season-worst 2-for-18 from 3-point range, including 0-for-10 in the second half. Ideally, for a team shooting about 34% on the year, that’s a one-time anomaly.
Still, the following pattern is undeniable: FDU finished the NEC regular season 8-8, going 8-0 against the bottom four teams in the standings and 0-8 against the top four teams.
Central Connecticut is the most daunting team in the NEC this year by a mile. FDU made it close in its first meeting against LIU and both games against St. Francis. But the Knights didn’t get over the hump once during the regular season against one of these teams.
That doesn’t mean it can’t happen during the NEC tournament. On the flip side, FDU isn’t guaranteed a win over Stonehill on Wednesday just because it swept the Skyhawks this winter.
“We got to be ready for the moment,” Castleberry said. “You got to be able to knock down some shots when you’re open. We got to take care of the basketball more and we didn’t do a very good job rebounding. I know I’m saying the same things over and over again, but they’re foundational things in the game of basketball.”
FDU spent a ton of energy trying to force Malachi Davis and his teammates into turnovers, but the Knights ended up losing 18 turnovers to LIU’s 12. Terrence Brown finished with a team-high 13 points, four rebounds and four steals but had six turnovers.
Bismark Nsiah (11 points and 12 rebounds) and Tyree Barba-Bey (10 points) had fine performances on their senior day. Both transferred to FDU from Jefferson, where they competed in the Division II NCAA Tournament, experience that hopefully gives them an edge during knockout play in March.
Quick shoutout to whomever maintained this particular Wikipedia page this season. For a niche like small-conference college hoops, it was surprisingly well-sourced and updated during the regular season, and it explained the latest rule changes I hadn’t kept up with (newcomer Mercyhurst is ineligible for this year’s NEC tournament, while Stonehill and Le Moyne can compete but are too new to D1 to receive the league’s auto bid to the NCAAs).
Should FDU defeat Stonehill on Wednesday, in all likelihood it will be taking a trip to Central Connecticut, currently the winners of 12 straight. For FDU, the question is simply whether it can tap into its best basketball when the lights will be brightest.
………
Hi there, hello. We’ve made it to every college basketball fan’s favorite month. That was the penultimate Saturday of the regular season (or for teams like FDU and Monmouth, the final day). We’re about to hit warp speed; I know it’ll feel like March will go by in a blink and I’ll suddenly be at the Sweet 16 in Newark.
Lots of impactful results over the last few days that we need to get to, so let’s clean the glass:
I want to start with the Princeton women, the only team in the state of New Jersey with a legitimate shot at an at-large tournament berth, amazing as that is. Entering Friday, the Tigers were ESPN’s last team in, with Harvard exactly one spot above them. Then Princeton went into Cambridge and led for the final 38:37 of the game for a 70-58 win. It was a master class, Princeton’s best performance of the season, and crucially, its first Quadrant 1 victory. Now 11-2 following Saturday’s win over Dartmouth, Princeton is locked into the No. 2 seed in Ivy Madness and will face Harvard a third time in the semifinals, but the Tigers still can share the regular-season title with Columbia if the Lions lose next Saturday.
Unbelievably important game for the Princeton men later today at Cornell. Who thought Nos. 2-6 in the Ivy League would be this bunched?
Two of those five teams will miss out, and either of these 7-5 teams could be on the chopping block with a loss today plus a loss in its season finale Saturday. However, Ivy odds guru Luke Benz’s latest model gives Princeton a 98.8% chance to make the tournament anyway, probably due to their weak final opponent, Penn.
Princeton went toe to toe with Cornell in their last meeting before giving up 20 points in the final five minutes. They need to defend without fouling (Cornell went 28-for-34 at the line) and it can’t just be the Lee and Pierce show. Does Jack Scott have another 10-point, seven-rebound, five-assist showing in him like last time?
The Monmouth men scored massive home wins Monday and Thursday to ensure its top-six spot in the CAA, despite Saturday’s 10-point loss at Drexel dropping them to 10-8 for the season. Winding up No. 6, a two-seed improvement over last year, means the Hawks avoid an early encounter with No. 1 Towson and will open Saturday against the winner between No. 11 seed Hofstra and No. 14 seed NC A&T. I’ll have a bit more on Monmouth on Tuesday.
In Big East women’s basketball, the likeliest combination of results today ends with Seton Hall locking up the No. 3 seed in the conference tourney. Seton Hall faces a last-place, very bad Xavier team on the road while Marquette goes to UConn. If Marquette pulls that upset, it will have the No. 3 seed at 13-5 no matter what Hall does, but a tie at 12-6 gets more complicated because Villanova could get in the mix. Don’t even spend time thinking about that – Hall will beat Xavier. (Did you see Savannah Catalon’s stat line the other night?)
It’s a similar story for the Rutgers women, except instead of a No. 3 seed, they’re just trying to extend their season. They play the last-pace team in their league today, Penn State. A win and a Purdue loss to Indiana creates a two-way tie at 3-15 and thanks to a previous win over the Boilers, Rutgers wins that head-to-head for the 15th and final seed in the Big Ten tourney. But if Northwestern upsets Nebraska to make it a three-way tie, it appears Rutgers won’t win that tiebreaker (the group would be 1-1 against each other and Northwestern would have the best win outside the group).
While Rutgers WBB’s season could very well end later today, the first men’s team in the state to pack it in will be NJIT. The Highlanders will finish last in the America East and miss the conference tournament for the second straight season. They’ve lost eight straight to fall to 2-13 in conference and their season finale is Tuesday at Binghamton.
Come back on Tuesday if you’re a paid subscriber, as I’ll go more in-depth with the last N.J. bracketology update of the regular season, including the state of the MAAC race.
