UW-Whitewater having been taken down earlier in the season put them in the same position as Mary Hardin-Baylor found itself in on Saturday: hoping for a successful Selection Sunday. Photo by Steve Frommell, d3photography.com

A new Texas is rising under the banner of Hardin-Simmons.

If you watched any of the first three quarters of the HSU game against Mary Hardin-Baylor, the defensive struggle between these two teams belied the offensive excitement that was to show up in the final period. The teams posted 29 points in the last 15 minutes of play, elevating the Cowboys to a 29-26 victory and helping to erase more than a decade of heartbreak at the hands of the Crusaders.

This game was profiled in the mid-week Around the Nation feature, looking at the arc HSU coach Jesse Burleson has taken from Cowboy player in 1998 against the first-ever UMHB team to his head coaching stint and pursuit of one of his team’s most elusive victories.

It’s no doubt a special moment, but it’s also one that must be short-lived. Work in the ASC isn’t done, and as energizing as it is to beat the No. 3 team in the nation, Hardin-Simmons must revisit success next week against East Texas Baptist in order to ensure the conference crown and, most likely, the Pool B playoff bid that goes with it.

In 2004, the last time HSU won the conference title, UMHB turned the tables in the playoffs and beat HSU en route to a spot in the national championship game. If HSU and UMHB both to win out again this season, it seems probably that they will each get a playoff spot (HSU as the nation’s lone Pool B and UHMB as a Pool C).

Keith McMillan, the former Around the Nation columnist, made a poignant observation on Twitter Saturday afternoon:

We're looking at a couple dangerous road teams in the #d3fb playoffs in (potentially) 9-1 UMHB and UW-Whitewater. Bad news for other Pool Cs

— Keith McMillan (@D3Keith) October 31, 2015

There’s no doubt: He’s exactly right. We may not know exactly which teams will be picked for an at-large bid, but this could be one of the most challenging Pool C fields in years, with UMHB, UW-Whitewater, St. John’s, Whitworth and Wartburg as all very real possibilities to be in that club. Two of those teams were national quarterfinalists last season.

We will know more about which teams are in the scope of the playoff picture on Wednesday when the NCAA is schedule to release its first Regional Rankings, which highlight the top eight teams in each of the Division III’s four regions. This is the ranking that is used for seeding playoff teams, and it will show us which teams that aren’t getting automatic bids to the postseason are on the regional commissions’ radars.

The playoff picture was shaken somewhat on Saturday. In addition to the clash in Texas, perhaps the other most anticipated matchup was between North Central and Illinois Wesleyan, both of which are Top 20 teams. Illinois Wesleyan was riding on an undefeated season, with a win over Franklin in nonconference play. But losing to North Central put a question mark on the Titans’ playoff prospects.

The team will need to be looking for other teams across the nation to stumble in the next two weeks or hope that they beat Wheaton on Nov. 7 to cast the CCIW into a three-way tie for first. The conference’s tiebreaker includes point differentials between the tied teams, so if Illinois Wesleyan wants to get in the postseason via Pool A, then it needs to not just beat Wheaton, it needs to dominate Wheaton.

North Central has no chance at Pool C, so it too is rooting for an Illinois Wesleyan win next weekend, albeit only a close victory. The Cardinals have three losses to very good teams, and the fact that they were able to so decisively put away an undefeated Illinois Wesleyan team points to exactly why Top 25 voters were still keeping a three-loss team on their ballots.

In the NJAC, Salisbury has also been pressured into a Pool A-or-nothing situation. The Gulls were in a position to be a contender as a Pool C team, even if they drew a second loss against Route 13 rival Wesley. But fellow NJAC newcomer Christopher Newport ruined those plans with a heavy hitting 51-point effort. Salisbury needed just 36 seconds to get its first touchdown of the game, but CNU answered back for the next two scores and piled it on from there and defensively held the Gulls to their lowest rushing total of the season.

To further spread out to the top of the conference, Frostburg State dropped its second conference game of the season, taking some of the cachet out of their annual Regents Cup rivalry game with Salisbury. For as strong as the NJAC is, we could ultimately see the conference send only one team to the playoffs.

More on the playoff picture

It’s usually this week of the season when we see the first teams clinching playoff bids.  But with conference realignments, there are fewer nonconference games at the end of the year, meaning there are more opportunities for conferences to still shake things up. So as of right now, we have exactly one team that’s guaranteed a spot in the postseason: St. Scholastica. We can make reasonable predictions about others, but this is an anything-can-happen sport. The Saints are currently the only guarantee.

In the Empire 8, we’re now nine weeks into the regular season, and Cortland State’s latest loss and St. John Fisher being tied with at the top are perhaps two of the biggest surprises we’ve seen emerge. Cortland had a big opening weekend win, and Fisher had an epic loss, but they are both still fighting for the Empire 8 playoff bid. Six of the conference’s nine teams have either two or three conference losses, so expect a tiebreaker scenario to play out.

Same thing with the MIAA, though the depth of teams angling to make the playoffs isn’t nearly as deep. Albion beat Olivet, which beat Trine, which beat Albion, so if each of them win out as expected, the tiebreaker appears to favor Albion.

Poll positions

As I put together my Top 25 ballot, my confidence wavered when I got past the No. 20 spot. Too many teams that I had in the high teens or in the 20s last week didn’t inspire confidence with their play this week – Cortland State, Salisbury, Texas Lutheran and Concordia-Morehead, to name a few.

Rare has been the time when I didn’t feel like I could fully defend my selections, from No. 1 all the way down to No. 25. As we tend to see late in the season, lots of quality one-loss and two-loss teams dot the nation, many of them having endured a baffling blemish on their resumes. Delaware Valley, St. Lawrence and Huntingdon are among some of the best examples of that.

Voters must decide how forgiving to be. After all, the vote we cast isn’t technically votes for, say, the 20th-best team of the season, rather it is a vote for the 20th-best team of Week 9. It becomes a little easier to overlook an early season loss as not being indicative of the team that performed on the field on the final day of October.

For that reason, a team like Delaware Valley has climbed my ballot and sits at No. 16 despite giving a floundering Wilkes its only win of the season.  

Teams with more recent losses make the job of a voter – my job – even more difficult because it’s so hard to look past those games. Even factoring the concept of a neutral field and how two teams would fare if they played each other 10 times, it’s hard to justify some of the losses teams have recently endured.

So they fall from their ballot spot in the high teens or the 20s. Teams they lost to aren’t good enough to get votes or be considered for the poll. So what does that mean for a team like Cortland State? They might end up winning the Empire 8, but is a team that has two losses to 5-3 squads going to be in those 20th to 25th spots? The case is a hard one to make. Being a pollster doesn’t necessarily get easier the deeper we get into the regular season.

Other things you need to know

• Guilford turned in one of the best offensive-yardage performances of Division III in a 52-49 win over Catholic. The Quakers, one of the leaders of the ODAC, piled up 725 yards, 611 of which came from the arm of quarterback Matt Pawlowski. That’s the single-best passing game for a quarterback this season.
• Case Western Reserve’s Adrian Cannon picked off Washington U.’s quarterback three times and the team totaled six interceptions as the Spartans cruised to a 34-16 win.
• N.C. Wesleyan and Averett combined to put more than 100 points on the board, but it was Bishops running back Adrian Minondo’s 278-yard, four-touchdown performance that was most impressive.
• Albion quarterback Dominc Bona passed for 373 yards and five touchdowns (and added 46 yards rushing) against Olivet in the Britons’ quest to stay in the race for the postseason.
• Trine’s Mark Wilson turned in a 240-yard rushing performance as the Thunder barely edged Kalamazoo.

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.)