For teams that now have two losses or more, such as Texas Lutheran, the path to the playoffs is uncertain. Photo by Joe Fusco, d3photography.com

The ASC has essentially locked up Division III’s lone Pool B bid for 2015 – the only question will be whether that spot goes to Mary Hardin-Baylor or to Hardin-Simmons. We won’t know the answer before next weekend when those teams meet in Abilene.

UMHB dealt Texas Lutheran its second loss of the season, essentially knocking TLU out of Pool B contention and deep into the Pool C race. The crippling part, though, is that the Bulldogs are a team with two “good” losses on its resume (or at least losses to two very good teams) but lacking any good wins. Those kinds of teams will get passed over in the at-large selection process.

North Central is another team feeling that kind of pain. The Cardinals have three good losses – close losses to teams that were ranked No. 4, No. 8 and No. 12 as of Saturday – and I would not be surprised to still see them in the Top 25 poll (they’re on my ballot). But assuming Wheaton or Illinois Wesleyan wins the CCIW’s automatic bid to the playoffs, there’s no way an at-best 7-3 team is going to get a shot at the postseason via Pool C. NCC will have had plenty of reasons to prove why it should make the playoffs, and as of Week 8, there are no marquee wins.

I don’t view the playoff system simply as a venue to give college athletes a little more time in the year to have fun on the field – that is a byproduct of the bigger picture, which is to crown a champion team of Division III. That’s why the playoff criteria is structured the way it is, with the hope of finding you, me and every other person in the D-III community a team we can recognize as the best.

This was certainly the kind of weekend that we needed to separate out some of the challengers. In addition to the UMHB/TLU and Wheaton/NCC games, there were three other matchups involving Top 25 teams against one another. Linfield and UW-Oshkosh got blowout wins against their ranked foes, helping to solidify their spots in roughly the top four or five teams in the nation.

Wesley, on the other hand, never really took command of its game against Rowan until the second half, and even then, things lingered within just one score for much of the fourth quarter. It’s the second time this season the Wolverines have defeated a Top 25 opponent; neither of those times were in overwhelming fashion. Comparing how Wesley handles its best opponents vs. how other top squads handle theirs, it looks like we have a Wesley team that might be a step behind some of the school’s national quarterfinal and national semifinal teams we’ve seen in recent seasons.

Amid all of that, it was Mount Union’s performance against a superbly underwhelming Wilmington squad that gave us the night’s most well-rounded number: 100. There was talk on Twitter all week about how this was going to be Mount’s 100th consecutive regular-season victory. The most recent defeat came on Oct. 22, 2005, against Ohio Northern. Teams have challenged in the years since – Baldwin Wallace in 2006, Capital in 2009, Marietta in 2010, Heidelberg in 2013 and John Carroll twice in 2014 – but none has been able to dismantle The Machine.

Beyond the Top 25

While the ranked-on-ranked matchups drew the most attention of the weekend and will be broken down more thoroughly in the weekly ATN Podcast on Monday morning, some of the most exciting moments of conference separation came as we drilled deeper into the ranks of D-III.

By all accounts, the MIAA had seemed to be on a path for a title showdown next weekend between Olivet and Albion, both of which were undefeated before this weekend. Trine put a wrinkle in that plan, toppling Albion, the team I saw as Michigan’s front-runner.

Now, Albion is in a tricky position of creating a potential three-way tie if it beats the Comets on Saturday.

If Albion beats Olivet who beat Trine who beat Albion, and all win out otherwise, then the MIAA brass has to bust out their tiebreaker criteria to share with us who gets the automatic qualifier. Right now, the conference’s website only generically states: “The MIAA football champion shall be determined based upon best won-loss record in MIAA conference play. The regular season champion will qualify for the NCAA championships.” There’s no transparency beyond that.

Partway across the country, the Liberty League shook, rattled and rolled with some head-turning results from Saturday. Hobart dropped its second conference game of the season, 21-20 against RPI. This is crucial because St. Lawrence won its outing against Springfield, leaving the Saints as the only team undefeated in LL play and carrying the head-to-head win over one-loss RPI.

The Saints have three games left on their schedule, and they have wiggle room to take a loss without jeopardizing their postseason hopes. Two losses will create a stickier situation for them and will turn the Liberty race into something akin to the clogged race among their New York brethren, the Empire 8.

The Centennial got more clarity as two of the teams with one conference loss dropped their Saturday matchups. Gettysburg lost to front-runner Johns Hopkins while Franklin and Marshall thudded against Moravian, which now remains as the only one-loss team left. That loss, however, comes against JHU, so the Blue Jays have the inherent edge going through the final weeks of the regular season.

Some of the performances from the middle of the ODAC pack were raising some red flags. Catholic hung around with Emory and Henry into the fourth quarter, while Shenandoah rallied late to stay in the game with Hampden-Sydney before failing to complete the arc for the win.

The thing about the ODAC is that there are four teams – Washington and Lee, Guilford, E&H and H-SC – that have enough still going for them that they could win at least a share of the conference title, if not the automatic qualifier. Those four teams still have three games between themselves that will help to sort things out, not to mention the ability of so many other teams in the Old Dominion to rise up and throw in an upset when it’s least expected.

The MAC may be one of the conferences that has turned out exactly as few expected. Envision a conference with a loaded powerhouse playoff team ready to again cause some damage, a traditional conference leader weathering a graduation-depleted starting lineup, a surprise team starting the season winning six games, and finally a relative newcomer building off a respectable eight-win season in 2014. The current leader? It’s the graduation-depleted team, Delaware Valley.

The Aggies have a baffling loss to Wilkes this season, but other than that, they’ve been doing nothing but winning. They’ve beaten the other one-loss teams in the conference and are in the driver’s seat to get themselves back to the postseason.

What’s interesting about how the MAC is playing out is how far Widener has fallen. The Pride were a national quarterfinal team in 2014 and had a large number of weapons back to reprise that run. But an opening week loss was followed by two conference losses, making Widener almost an afterthought (unwise as that notion may seem for the teams yet to play them).

One previously undefeated team took a notable fall this week was DePauw. The Tigers had been riding some skepticism ahead of its game against Wittenberg earlier this month, but that victory put DPU on the national map and almost had them breaking into the Top 25. In a twist, Ohio Wesleyan, coming off a loss to Hiram last weekend, stunned DePauw 27-22 with defensive and special teams touchdowns. All is not lost for DPU, however. Three weeks from now is the Monon Bell Classic against rival Wabash, an undefeated and ranked NCAC team. Despite DPU’s stumble here in Week 8, knowing that a head-to-head contest will still be played for the conference crown saps none of the anticipation and intensity out of that matchup.

The weekend’s games closed with a late West Coast tilt between Cal Lutheran and Chapman. The Panthers erupted for their best win of the season (one of only two total in that category) thanks largely to 263 yards from one of the conference’s top rushers, Jeremiah McKibbins. The meat of the SCIAC is now a bunch of teams that are 2-2 in conference play with the two teams at the top, La Verne and Claremont-Mudd-Scripps having yet to play some of those in the middle of the pack. This is one of the most wide-open conference races in the nation.

Other things you need to know

• Linfield’s first-team All-American defensive lineman, Alex Hoff, caught a touchdown pass and blocked a punt in the Wildcats’ rout of fellow NWC team Whitworth. He also recorded a sack, something that should be of no surprise considering he’s in the Top 20 nationally in sacks per game.
• ETBU’s Kendall Roberson rolled up 420 rushing yards in just 45 minutes of play against Belhaven. The cherry on top was the five touchdowns he scored in his team’s runaway win.
• Heath Haden’s 132-yard passing performance pushed him over the top to become Centre’s all-time leader in career passing yards.
• Western New England is 7-0 so far this season, but their record is a bit deceptive. The team has yet to play the three NEFC teams that have only one nonconference loss each, which means this grouping is still very wide open.
• Heidelberg rusher Brian Lacey played only the first half against Marietta but was able to amass 207 yards on 16 carries in that span, with four touchdowns.

Weekend recap, columns, tweets and more

For the facts and figures of this weekend in football, check out D3football.com’s Top 25 recap and the national roundup.

There will be a handful of opportunities each week for me to showcase what’s going on nationally in Division III. On:

• Sundays, look for my reaction and recap of Saturday’s games in Snap Judgments;
• Thursdays, see my centerpiece feature story of the week;
• Fridays, read our Triple Take prediction column, where Pat, Keith and I give you some things to look out for in the following day’s games, including the top matchups and upset possibilities.

Between all that will be D3football.com’s regional columns, the ATN podcast, and the team of the week, among other things. Don’t go too far!

Follow me on Twitter at @NewsTipps, as well as D3football.com’s main account, @d3football.

(Also, if you are tweeting about Division III football, don't forget to use the #d3fb hashtag.)