East Texas Baptist made a quagmire of the Pool B picture with a win vs. Hardin-Simmons. ETBU athletics photo

Look out Amherst, Case and Wabash -- this seems to be the year that long rivalry win streaks go bust.

This week was more about streaks, though. It was a lesson in why games are played, and why we go the full 11 weeks and don’t just throw in the towel midway through the year. We don’t assume. We can’t assume. The phrase “any given Saturday” is overplayed, but darned if it’s not a perfect descriptor of the collegiate landscape.

Salisbury, which hadn’t beaten its Route 13 rival, Wesley, in 11 years, traded scores for four quarters before taking the final lead with a field goal with less than 2:30 left in the game. Some of the scoring drives in the first half lasted just 26 seconds and 39 seconds, with two others needing less than two minutes. It was a game that was often ruled by offenses, and the Gulls came out ahead.

Their win, helps to massively shake up the Pool C picture. If Salisbury can repeat this performance against their other rival, Frostburg State, next weekend, then the Gulls clinch the NJAC title and push Wesley into the at-large pool. (Salisbury, by the way, is working on a long win streak of its own against Frostburg, dating back to 2003.)

In my best game-show announcer voice: But wait, there’s more!

Just a week after Hardin-Simmons snapped a decade-long skid against Mary Hardin-Baylor, the Cowboys stumbled in their final large ASC test, the game against East Texas Baptist. ETBU has yet to play UMHB, so the scenario we’ll most likely see is either ETBU standing alone with the conference title or a three-way tie.

This conference doesn’t have a Pool A bid; would Hardin-Simmons have won out, the Cowboys would have been as close to a Pool B lock as one could possibly imagine. Now, who knows how the selection committee will react?

If the ASC does come down to a three-way tie, it’s reasonable to still expect the Pool B bid to go to one of those teams, particularly since UMHB and HSU would be one-loss teams and have both beaten Texas Lutheran. But the conference has no say in which of its teams -- if any -- is selected (in Pool A, the conferences themselves determine their tie-breaker scenarios).

One interesting question is if ETBU wins next week is whether a two-loss Crusaders team would be in consideration for a Pool C bid? Maybe the bigger question is if HSU wins next week, does this week’s loss even matter, since the Cowboys are well positioned for that lone Pool B bid?

ETBU’s win over Hardin-Simmons casts Texas Lutheran in a better light. Even though TLU lost to HSU earlier this season, it also beat ETBU. It will be interesting on Wednesday to see whether ETBU will be regionally ranked and how much TLU’s stock would rise because of that.

Speaking of the regional rankings, there will be a lot of shakeups beyond the games that I’ve already mentioned. A handful of regionally ranked teams from last week -- Delaware Valley, Maryville, Rose-Hulman and Illinois Wesleyan -- lost on Saturday, and as least two of those teams are sure to drop out of the ranking completely. Plus, teams like Wheaton, Thomas More and Guilford won in games that helped them boost their strength of schedule, possibly positioning them better for playoff seeding or, in Guilford’s case, a Pool C possibility.

Pool C, in general, is getting a whole lot more ferocious because of this week’s games. A (highly speculative) at-large mix of UW-Whitewater, Mary Hardin-Baylor, Wesley, St. John’s, Whitworth and John Carroll sounds a whole lot closer to a list of national quarterfinalists than it does the non-automatic qualifiers. It would be of little shock to see the teams on this list to be selected a week from today -- and it would be just as expected to see many, if not all, of them seeded higher than teams like Norwich or St. Scholastica who have won their conferences. Again, it’s something we would need to reference the regional rankings for to get an understanding of how the regional committees seed their teams.

Getting a lift

Some teams that didn’t have their own fate entirely in their hands benefited greatly from games elsewhere in a conference.

Norwich won its game against Husson, the only other team that had been undefeated in conference play. But Norwich also dodged the potential of a three-way tie thanks to Becker, which knocked off Castleton, which is Norwich’s opponent next week. A make-or-break situation going into the final week of the regular season has been avoided, and now Norwich has clinched the conference’s automatic bid.

Albright got a boost from Delaware Valley’s second baffling loss of the season. The Aggies were a one-loss MAC team because of an early-season stumble against Wilkes; this week, the Aggies fell to a 3-6 Lycoming team. Now Albright, which lost to DelVal late last month, is alone at the top of the MAC and can secure the conference’s AQ with a win against Lebanon Valley. Should the Lions lose, then there would be a three-way tie for the conference title, with Delaware Valley holding the head-to-head victories over both Albright and Stevenson.

Hendrix, too, kept its playoff hopes alive thanks to a middling Birmingham-Southern breaking out its second highly stellar game of the year to knock off conference front-runner Berry. (Earlier this season, B-S beat Huntingdon, which is currently 8-1 and guaranteed a playoff spot.) Could Birmingham-Southern be one of those teams that plays to the level of the competition, so to speak? We’ve certainly seen it before in teams (I so want to name names here, but I’m going to hold back). Either way, a win next week by Hendrix against 1-8 Sewanee and a loss by Berry to 7-2 Centre would change the whole dynamic of the SAA.

Of course, the reward for the Warriors may well be a trip to the Pool B (a Texas) team, while Berry could get a more favorable draw against the aforementioned Huntingdon because of geographic proximity. (Hendrix is within 500 miles of ETBU and UMHB, but not HSU.) That said, Huntingdon is within 500 miles of both schools and basically nobody else in the playoff hunt, so Huntingdon might play the SAA champ no matter what while the NCAA lets the Texas playoff teams (assuming there will be more than one) sort things out the way they have always had to.

Clinching it

St. Lawrence lost and has to wait another week to earn its chance into the postseason via the Liberty League’s AQ. Case Western Reserve dropped out of the picture entirely, as did Maryville and Coast Guard. But 14 teams on Saturday did punch their tickets to the postseason, to join St. Scholastica, which clinched the previous week.

The complete list of teams who have won their conferences’ automatic qualifiers can be found here.

Based on preseason expectations, Norwich, Dubuque and Washington and Lee almost certainly emerge as the most surprising of the bunch. All were expected to be more middle-of-the-pack teams; instead, they are going to be playing one week longer than thousands upon thousands of other football players this season.

Final Snap Judgments

This is the last Snap Judgments column of the season -- I had to slip that in here somewhere. Next week, with Selection Sunday and so much else going on once the Saturday games end, there will be plenty to keep you busy. However, I will be working on compiling D3football.com’s annual Surprises and Disappointments column, which brings in a host of analysts on staff to look at which teams could fare well and surprise us, and which ones could disappointingly fall flat. That will be published in Around the Nation in the middle of the week after Selection Sunday.

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.)