The 2024-25 Kentucky men’s basketball team was put together, in its entirety, in one offseason.
New UK Head Coach Mark Pope inherited a roster with zero returning scholarship players after John Calipari departed for Arkansas, and leaned heavily on the transfer portal to construct the entire group, finding diamonds in the rough from across the country.
With the group coming from all over the place, some have had plenty of experience in the NCAA Tournament while others have never played in the dance. One, however, was a part of perhaps one of the biggest upsets in NCAA Tournament history: Ansley Almonor.
A zero-star prospect out of Our Savior Lutheran School in New York City, Almonor didn’t have too many college offers at the NCAA Division-I level and opted to commit to a small school just outside his home city in New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson.
Under Knights Head Coach Tobin Anderson, Almonor had a sophomore year to remember as his squad benefited from an NCAA policy regarding schools transitioning to the D-1 level.
See, playing in the NEC, the best team in the conference was Massachusetts-based Merrimack, which not only won the conference’s regular season championship, but also won the NEC Tournament, which should have secured the Warriors a spot in the big dance.
Unfortunately for the 2022-23 Warriors, they were still in the process of transitioning to the top level of collegiate sports from the NCAA Division-II level and were denied a bid to the tournament.
Needing a representative in March Madness, the NEC awarded the bid to the runners up in the conference: FDU.
Being sent to Dayton for the First Four, Fairleigh Dickinson dominated Texas Southern 84-61 to make it to the first round of the NCAA Tournament against No. 1 seed Purdue. Almonor was crucial in this win as he logged a stellar 23 points to push the Knights to victory.
After the win, the Knights went viral online for a video showing Anderson telling his squad, “The more I see Purdue, the more I think we can beat them.”
Social media clowned on Anderson and the Knights as only one No. 16 seed had ever beaten a No. 1 in the history of the tournament and the Boilermakers boasted National Player of the Year Zach Edey.
Sure enough, however, when the final buzzer sounded in Nationwide Arena in Columbus, FDU did beat Purdue, winning 63-58 in one of the largest upsets in tournament history and the single largest point-spread upset in the history of the tournament. Almonor played 25 minutes in the game.
