We’ll get back to Exodus and Moses, but the NCAA Basketball Tournament has provided a story too good to pass up: in 2018, the 36th year of the 64-team format for the tournament, a 16-seed defeated a 1-seed when the University of Maryland-Baltimore defeated Virginia. It took only 5 years for lightning to strike again when Fairleigh-Dickinson University (FDU) defeated mighty Purdue yesterday.

It really was David versus Goliath: FDU has the smallest team in the tournament with their tallest guy “only” 6′ 6″. By contrast Purdue’s center, Zach Edey is 7′ 4″, and the Wall Street Journal had already written a feature about him and the Purdue team. Here’s a snippet:

[Purdue coach Matt] Painter’s strategy of building around large, surprisingly agile athletes has made the Boilermakers a mainstay in the top of the Big Ten in recent years. This season, a 7-foot 4 wrecking ball named Zach Edey has catapulted 26-5 Purdue to loftier heights—a Big Ten regular-season title, the top seed in the conference tournament that begins this week and the No. 1 ranking in the nation for seven weeks this winter. Come Selection Sunday, Purdue could possibly secure a one-seed for the NCAA tournament—which would be its first top seed since 1996. Should the Boilermakers’ winning ways continue, they could snap Purdue’s 41-year Final Four appearance drought. – Laine Higgins, Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2023

While Edey did score 21 points and snag 15 rebounds yesterday, he didn’t get off a shot in the last 12 minutes. Why? Because the FDU coach had a plan. He had told his team, “The more I watch Purdue, the more I think we can beat them.” Really?

The Fairleigh Dickinson Knights were easily the worst team in this year’s 68-team field… And they were the extraordinarily rare No. 16 seed to sneak into the NCAA tournament without winning their conference tournament first… But…

A bunch of tiny players with a first-year coach managed to knock off a team led by a 7-foot-4 giant that was a favorite to win the national championship. For the rest of the details, read the whole article by Ben Cohen and Andrew Beaton, Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2023.

That article contains a lot of technical detail. What I saw in the few minutes of the game I was able to see was that FDU out-hustled Purdue. It’s not as simple as that, but certainly, that had to be a factor.

The point, of course, is that the unexpected does happen. Furman, a 13-seed, had already knocked off Virginia, a 4-seed, and 2-seed Arizona lost to 15-seed Princeton. Clemson, top seed in the NIT, lost their first game as well to a team they should have been able to beat handily.

As we move into Exodus, the Israelites were certainly underdogs to mighty Egypt…or were they?

Got any rivers you think are uncrossable?
Got any mountains you can’t tunnel through?
God specializes in things thought impossible
and he will do what no other power can do. (Lyrics by Oscar C. Eliason)

Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us… (Ephesians 3.20, NKJV)