Iona fired men’s basketball coach Tobin Anderson after two seasons, the school announced Monday, two days after the Gaels fell to Mount St. Mary’s in the MAAC tournament championship game Saturday.
Anderson, 53, joined the program in 2023 as Rick Pitino’s replacement after Pitino was named the coach at St. John’s. At the time, Anderson was coming off a season in which he coached No. 16-seeded Fairleigh Dickinson to the second round of the NCAA Tournament after an iconic upset over No. 1 Purdue in the first round.
That victory helped Anderson earn widespread public recognition and the job at Iona, which he departs with a 33-34 record over two campaigns — a 16-17 record in 2023-24 and a 17-17 record in 2024-25. He agreed to a five-year deal with the school in 2023, per ESPN.
The Gaels finished the latest regular season with three straight wins and advanced to the MAAC tournament title game as the No. 4 seed, where they fell to the No. 6 Mountaineers 63-49 to dash their NCAA Tournament hopes.
“We appreciate Tobin and everything he has done for our program,” Iona athletic director Matthew Glovaski said in a statement to multiple outlets. “He has been a valuable member of our Iona community. With the impact of NIL changing college basketball in ways no one could have imagined, Iona feels the need to shift the direction of our men’s basketball program. This requires an overhaul of our entire business model and program structure.”
Before his time at Fairleigh Dickinson — which he transformed from a 4-22 team in 2021-22 to a 21-16 team in his lone season there in 2022-23 — Anderson held multiple head-coaching roles at the Division III level and spent nine seasons coaching Division II St. Thomas Aquinas, which he departed with a 209-62 record.
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