The announced attendance at Sunday’s Rider-Iona came was 611. Not 1,611. Just plain old 611. It’s semester break, which means no students and naturally lower attendance, but that means at least 600 to 700 people would have gone to the game but stayed home to watch the Eagles-Giants playoff game on TV.

At least a few dozen of those people were wearing Eagles or Giants jerseys, and at half-time, a whole bunch of people were gathered around the flat-screen TV outside the gym entrance watching the game.

Lawrenceville is just about on the dividing line between Giants territory and Eagles territory, Tommy Dempsey is a proud Giants fan, and just about every Rider player is an Eagles fan, so maybe it was inevitable that at the Broncs’ postgame press conference, there were about 9,000 references to the Jints-Birds game that concluded around the time the conclusion of the Broncs’ heartburn-inducing 70-69 win over the Gaels.

I’m not going to lie. I’m occasionally prone to do and/or say outrageously stupid things. I’m not saying that I’m a male, sportswriting, basketball-obsessed, blogging, vocally and aesthetically challenged version of Jessica Simpson. But occasionally my mind just isn’t where it needs to be.

I’m not saying the same thing is true about Ryan Thompson, but both Thompson and I had Donovan McNabb moments of cluelessness within about 30 seconds of one another.

A brief rundown of the exchange between Thompson, me and Dempsey goes as follows:

Thompson was describing to reporters what was going through his mind before he made a free-throw with 3.3 seconds left to produce Rider’s margin of victory when he channeled McNabb and said the following:

“Having your leader miss a big shot at a big time kind of puts everyone down. I didn’t want to have my teammates have to go through another 10-minute overtime, or however many minutes it is.”

That’s right. The same guy who hit a running layup last year in the very same gym against the very same Iona team to force a FIVE-minute overtime, at the moment, for whatever reason, thought overtimes were twice as long as they actually are.

Thompson has played in almost 100 college basketball games, countless games in high school, summer leagues, showcases, you name it, and there’s no way he really doesn’t know how long overtime is. But at that moment, he didn’t know what the heck was going on.

Dempsey, sitting next to him, chimed in and said “it’s five minutes, Donovan,” after which I informed Dempsey that the last I had seen, the Giants were on the verge of losing to the Eagles.

Dempsey responded by saying “there’s only one game I was focused on today and it just ended.”

I was sitting there, silently wondering if the Eagles had in fact finished off the Giants, and as I was spacing out, the words “there’s only one game I was focused on today,” went one ear and out the other. All I heard was “it just ended,” and thought, with absolutely no justification, that Dempsey was informing me the football game had ended.

Then came my Jessica Simpson moment, in which I blurted out “oh, did it end?”

Dempsey looked at me like I was either stupid, crazy, utterly clueless, on some sort of drugs, or all of the above, laughed, and said “that wasn’t the game I was worried about.”

As idiotic as McNabb not knowing NFL games can, in fact, end in ties? Probably not, but I hope all the Eagles fans who had been piling on McNabb after tie-gate and have openly loathed him since they booed him on draft day cut him some slack now that he’s led their beloved Birds to another NFC title game.

As for Rider, the Broncs are leaving today at noon for Buffalo, where they'll take on Canisius and Niagara before returning to the New York area to play Fairfield on Jan. 23 in what's sure to be a rowdy Alumni Hall. I will not be joining them in Buffalo, meaning my consecutive games streak will end at 15 for the year. Not bad though, right?

As for the rest of the MAAC, there could be some movement in the PMI, which I'll post later today.

And don't worry. I won't space out and forget.