OK, so I’ve written in the past about my concerns about Rowan (Immediate thoughts on Week 7 and Week 9). Today my fears came true. Rowan couldn’t muster up enough offense (or, according to observers, much of a sense of urgency) in a 20-19 loss at William Paterson. When was the last time William Paterson was the lead story on D3football.com? Sept. 19, 2002, for a Mark Simon Feature on a pair of Pioneers who returned to football after returning from military service.

Funny, when I started to write that sentence, my assumption was “never” — but I checked it out.

Rowan needs to come out firing next week. They won’t get into the playoffs with two losses, not in their final two games. There might be a two-loss team that gets in the field somewhere, but not in this situation. Rowan wins and it’s in (beating both Cortland State and Montclair, the other two teams they’d be tied with). If Montclair wins, Cortland goes to the playoffs because Cortland beat Montclair.

Nice little 32-0 run, Whitewater. That was another one of the early scores that sent ripples through knowledgeable D-III fans.

Who’d have thought that we could have six potential playoff teams meeting at the Monon Bell, Cortaca Jug and Dutchman Shoes games next week? Cortaca won’t have any effect on whether either team makes the playoffs (Cortland’s at-large bid chances are a longshot at best, they wouldn’t even be the best two-loss team out there) but Ithaca is in and Cortland will be scoreboard-listening. RPI almost didn’t make it to this dance, however, needing a late TD to beat Rochester.

Capital had another great day on defense. In fact, if you throw out the Mount Union game, Capital has allowed just 7.6 points per game all season. Usually I’m not in favor of throwing out a game to make a point, but Capital has allowed just 11.4 points per contest even with that game, and shoot, for most of the past decade the Purple Raiders have been the Priceline of offense — you know, name your own score.

Only today did McDaniel refute my hypothesis that their 4-1 season could very well turn into 4-6. The Green Terror had lost four in a row before beating Muhlenberg today 13-6.

Ferrum clinched its first playoff bid since 1990, UW-Whitewater its first since 1997, and Johns Hopkins its first ever. Welcome to the show. See you on ESPNews in a week.

If Crown plays Southwest Assemblies of God and nobody reports a score, does it count?

E-mail of the day:

Below is the result of your feedback form. It was submitted by
K (xxxxxx@comcast.net) on Saturday, November 05, 2005 at 09:55:34 AM
—————————————————————————
Subject: What About Rowan
Notes: I consistanly monitor your website and I think that it great, however you never write anything about Rowan football. Rowan has been at the top of Division III football for many years and you never give them any respect. I would like to see anything about Rowan football Thanks

I think the moral of the story is, don’t complain about lack of respect on Saturday morning. Save it for the blog. Ugh.

Alright, well, I’m stuck at home today. This site doesn’t cover the mortgage, so on days when I’m not at work my wife often has to work at her part-time job.

So far so good on the Trinity/Amherst game, looks like we did the right thing sending Keith McMillan up there. Sounds like a good game at this point, although Teamline keeps cutting out at inopportune times. As best as I can tell, Trinity scored a touchdown on a broken play/bad snap field goal. Amherst came back with a long TD pass, but the PAT was blocked and Trinity returned it for a defensive two-point conversion. Trinity (Conn.) 9, Amherst 6.

Have already heard good stuff from our folks in the field. Apparently there’s a scenario in which the LL comes down to a coin flip. Kings Point and Shenandoah could be candidates for the open MAC slots. Looks like the weather is holding up so far at Central/Wartburg. Rose-Hulman does live stats so we’ve added a link to the Rose-Hulman/DePauw game on the Scoreboard.

Will post more as I surf through games.

Don’t forget to unite behind Linfield quarterback Brett Elliott for Heisman. Every week you are allowed to cast a new vote. Click here to vote

Hopefully the combined power of Division III fans can lift Elliott into the top three. The top three vote-getters in the online voting receive the equivalent of a first-place, second-place and third-place vote in the official ballot tally. Now, we’re coming to this late in the game, so we need to get cracking. Thanks to correspondent Ron Boerger, who got the process started a little over a week ago.

Each vote must be confirmed — they send you a link via e-mail to click on to confirm your vote before it will be counted.

And if you doubt Division III in the Heisman race, don’t forget Plymouth State running back Joe Dudek finished ninth in the balloting in 1985. Some guy named Bo Jackson won the thing that year.

Please note, voteforheisman.com appears to be frequently culling what it considers fraudulent votes. I reminded them that many colleges run behind proxy servers, which means all users on campus look like they are coming from the same IP address. They promised me they are not excluding votes based solely on IP addresses.

No need to stuff the ballot box. Let’s do it fair and square.