Yesterday, I blogged a little bit about Rider's NIT chances and got this good bit of feedback from a reader who felt I was too generous to the Broncs when I said I would probably include them as a No. 8 seed were I on the NIT committee:

• As for Rider's resume - it's putrid. Overall RPI of 110, which is not terrible (but far higher than the last at-large NiT team last year, which was Hofstra with an RPI of 76). However, overall strength of schedule of 253 (compared to Siena's of 118) and an out of conference RPI of 151 and out of conference strength of schedule of 291 (that's embarassing). Siena on the other hand has an out of conference RPI of 56 with an out of conference strength of schedule of 18. Siena's 22-10 record is light year's better than Rider's 23-10 when you dig a little to see who they've played.

Today, I set out to write a column detailing the Broncs' situation, and as I did a little more homework, I tended to lean more toward agreeing with what that reader wrote. 

After having looked at a lot of data and a cool web site we'll get to later on, I'm really on the fence. In my column in Saturday's Trentonian, I laid out all the pros and cons. Right now, I think the cons probably outweigh the pros, but I think its pretty close. 

I also considered some of the things I heard when I went to a lecture the other day given by Princeton athletic director Gary Walters, who was the chair of the 207 NCAA men's basketball committee. 

He gave a presentation detailing what the selection committee looks at when determining who to include in the NCAA tournament. The NIT committee uses the same data to make the same decisions regarding teams that are not included in the NCAA field. 

His take on the RPI is one that I think we all need to keep in mind: rather than a measure of absolute strength, it is merely a general measure of relative strength. 

There are plenty of holes in the formula, including no variable for home-court advantage and no weight to how well a team is playing at the end of the season, or as Walters put it, playing on an ascending curve instead of a descending curve. 

With that in mind, the RPI numbers on Rider can be a little misleading because they fail to take into consideration that the Broncs went 15-4 over their past 19 games. They also don't take into account that the Broncs played their last two games at far less than 100 percent, with Ryan Thompson on the bench with a concussion and Harris Mansell and Justin Robinson both playing on sprained ankles. 

Lastly, the Broncs' RPI is  hurt because Penn State, healthy in November when it lost to Rider, got bit by the injury bug and suffered late in the season, thus hurting Rider's strength of schedule. And Rider's loss to Drexel wasn't harmful at the time, but became much more harmful as the Dragons stumbled through their conference schedule and watched their RPI slip into the mid-200s. 

But the points that reader made about Rider's strength of schedule are well taken, and they made me think a little bit more prior to writing my column. And it should also be noted that while Rider's RPI would have improved if Penn State, Drexel and Rutgers won some more games, every other team in the country could use similar logic to argue their cases. 

As I started doing research, I came across a cool web site that I had never heard of: NITology.com.

It's run by Mike Scullin, a student at Saint Joe's who started it during the 2005-06 season. Last year, Mike correctly picked 29 out of the 32 teams in the NIT field. 

This year, as you can see by clicking on the link, he has the Broncs as a bubble team on the outside looking in. 

Click on the bracket link and you'll see that it includes Mike's projections for the CBI field. He has Rider as a 3 seed in the CBI, playing at Virginia in the first round. 

Mike also addressed the real wild card in trying to predict who will go where: with a financial package that, according to the Gazelle Group's Rick Giles is more lucrative than the NIT, there is a possibility that some teams will be selected for the NIT but chose to play in the CBI instead. 

Since this is the first year of the CBI, it's hard to tell how many, if any, teams will do that. But it's one more factor that could influence where Rider ends up. 

One bad sign for the Broncs is that of the 45 teams Mike has listed as candidates for at-large NIT bids, all but two have a higher RPI than them.

 Even given the concerns we talked about regarding RPI, that might be enough to keep them out of the field of 32. 

But if RPI were a perfect indicator (or even a nearly perfect indicator) of where teams went in tournaments, the No. 1 seeds in his hypothetical NIT field would be the teams with the top four RPI ratings. That's not the case, but in general, the teams with the best RPIs are included in his mock field, and those with lower RPIs are not. 

Here's a look at the field he had entering Friday's games, with each team's RPI. Obviously, this field will change depending on who wins conference tournaments. In fact, Saint Joe's, by virtue of its upset over Xavier, could get an at-large NCAA bid anyway. But for now, this is what we have, so this is what we'll look at. 

No. 1 seeds: Saint Joe's (50), Arizona State (81), Villanova (51), Florida (62)

No. 2 seeds: Syracuse (52), Maryland (82), Ole Miss (48), UMass (43)

No. 3 seeds: Dayton (32) , Creighton (49), New Mexico (58) , VCU (55)

No. 4 seeds: UAB (54), Texas Tech (65), Florida State (62), Oklahoma State (75)

No. 5 seeds: Southern Illinois (61), Cal (86), Charlotte (66), Rhode Island (75)

No. 6 seeds: Cleveland State (64), Georgia Tech (69), Miami of Ohio (73), Nevada (71) 

No. 7 seeds: IUPUI (74), San Diego State (76), Houston (78), Nebraska (92)

No. 8 seeds: Wake Forest (97), Minnesota (101), Robert Morris (134), UNC-Asheville (143)

On the outside looking in: 

Ohio (83), Akron (84), Wright State (87), Sam Houston State (90), UTEP (93), Cal State Fullerton (94), Valparaiso (96), Utah (98), Boise State (100), Bradley (103), Seton Hall (109), Rider (110), Missouri (112), Washington (118). 

Those numbers don't look great for Rider, but having tied Siena for the regular season title and posted the best point differential in conference play of any MAAC team, they certainly are worthy of consideration. 

The more points of view, the merrier, so feel free to chime in no matter what your take on the situation is.