Forget what anyone else said on October. By Tommy Dempsey's standards this season has been a failure.

After Rider's 84-62 rout of Marist Monday night, Tommy Dempsey grew defiant, telling reporters that "people are quick to forget that we were 10-8 last year and we got it going."

The Rider coach's critics will rightly point out that blowing out a team that has won a grand total of one game during the first two months of the season is hardly a sign of "getting it going."

And anyone who thought the Marist win an aberration had that view quickly validated, when the Broncs laid another egg Friday night in a 77-66 loss to Saint Peter's.

But as I watched the Broncs get beat up and down the floor by the upstart Peacocks, I kept thinking back to Dempsey's "got it going" quote and putting it in the context of Rider's expectations this season.

Rider, of course, isn't even heading in the right direction, let alone beginning a 10-game winning streak that will catapult the Broncs back toward the top of the MAAC standings. But here's the thing: Even if they were beginning such a roll-- even if, as Dempsey indicated might be the case, this team is about to replicate its late-season surges of the last two seasons -- people would be fully justified in calling them underachievers, based not on any external expectations, but on the standards that the Broncs themselves set before the season began.

Lest anyone forget, this is what Dempsey told me during a sit-down interview in his office in late September:

"Now there are no excuses. In our locker room, we talk about finishing first. That’s it. It’s not an excuse that Siena’s a top 20 team in the country. If they’re a top 20 team, we have to somehow find a way to be better than them. I’m not saying we’re at that level. Trust me, I’m, not saying that. But finishing second will be very disappointing to everyone in our program."

Quotes like that -- which seemed reasonable, if a bit too cocky, at the time -- put the absurdity of Dempsey's Monday remarks in context.

This is a team that, before the season began, declared loudly and clearly that a replication of last year -- when Rider finished third in the MAAC with a 12-6 record -- would not be close to acceptable.

Fast forward to Friday, when Dempsey said the following after the Broncs fell to 10-9 overall and 3-4 in the MAAC:

"I believe in these guys, I really do. I believe in Ryan. I believe in everyone else that we have. We're going to get it done. We're not going to be in the play-in game."

Even without stepping back and looking at the big picture, it's possible Dempsey's declaration will be proven false.

Only three teams right now -- 2-4 Manhattan, 2-5 Loyola and 1-6 Marist -- are below Rider in the standings. The three teams tied for fourth in the league at 3-3 are all in action Saturday, and two of them -- Iona and Niagara -- are playing each other, meaning at least one will fall into a tie with Rider. But of the teams that entered Friday in a five-way tie for third, Rider had played the least challenging schedule by far. The Broncs are done for the year with Marist and still have two games left against both Fairfield and Niagara, in addition to two games against Canisius and one more apiece against Siena, Iona, Saint Peter's, Loyola and Manhattan.

That schedule provoked a long-time Rider season-ticket-holder to approach me after Friday's game and bluntly tell me "Ben, you might not see another win this year. I don't know if they have any left on the schedule."

I doubt the season-ticket-holder is right. Even given how badly the Broncs have played, I'd be shocked if they end the conference schedule on a 15-game losing streak. That's something that very few teams in the country are bad enough to do, and I don't think this team is close to entering that realm.

But let's back up for a second. Let's look at the big picture -- that we're talking about the team Dempsey picked to win the league in the preseason coaches' poll. We're talking about a team that wanted no business of finishing second, let alone playing Manhattan in the 8-9 game Friday night at the MAAC tournament.

In that context, Rider's regular season will be a failure barring both a miraculous turnaround and an unexpected collapse by Siena, which enters Saturday's game at Fairfield having won all six of its MAAC games by double digits.

Think about this for a second: Even if Siena loses four games the rest of the way -- something significantly less likely than the Jets hosting the AFC Championship Game next week -- Rider needs to win out just to finish in a first-place tie with the Saints.

Worse still, Rider -- which has lost its last two MAAC home games by a combined 31 points -- needs to go 9-2 in its final 11 league games just to finish with the same 12-6 record it finished with last year. And remember, this is a team that has trailed by 13 or more points in five of its seven MAAC games and is facing a schedule that's only going to get harder.

I was not among the people who thought Rider deserved a spot in the Top 25 after beating Mississippi State, nor was I in the camp that the Broncs had proven themselves against one of the toughest non-conference schedules in the history of creation.

But to a large extent, this team had me and a whole lot of other people fooled. My prediction that Rider would finish second in the league seems absurd now, but not much more absurd than the predictions made by every other publication, and by the MAAC coaches, not one of whom voted Rider below third in the preseason poll.

Even the biggest Rider detractor couldn't have said with a straight face back then that the Broncs would finish in the bottom half of the league standings. If anyone said it or wrote it, I neither heard nor read it. But kudos to the few fans who called the Broncs frauds in late November. They look more correct now than any of the rest of us.

Maybe Dempsey was right on Monday. Maybe this team is about to get on a roll, to turn a corner, and to finish the season with a surge.

Yet to believe Dempsey now you'd have to believe that a team that's been overpowered more often than it's been competitive is capable of flipping a switch and pulling a bigger turnaround even than those of the past two seasons.

Of course, none of this will matter if Rider gets hot in March, pulls a string of upsets and wins the MAAC tournament for the first time since joining the league in 1997. Yet that's a possibility only in the context that technically, any team winning any conference tournament is possible.

As far as the regular season goes, getting hot now -- unless that entails running the table or coming close to doing so -- won't do anything to change this reality:

Judging by Rider's own internal expectations, the regular season is already a failure.