There's no denying the status quo: If they win out, undefeated Texas will play the winner of the Alabama/Florida SEC Championship for the BCS Championship. If there's attrition among the the "Big Three," though, the palace is open to a horde of barbarian contenders whose path to Pasadena isn't nearly as clear-cut. This series examines their prospects. Today: Cincinnati.

Assumptions: The Bearcats have no chance at the title game -- absolutely none whatsoever -- unless they finish 12-0, and they still face the two toughest games of their season, at home against West Virginia on Nov. 13 and at Pittsburgh for a possible winner-take-all game on the first Saturday in December. Cincy also has to deal with UConn, which dealt the Bearcats their only conference loss en route to the Big East title last year, and Illinois, which set itself up as a pending turnaround story with its first decent effort of the season in last Saturday's win over Michigan.

Virtues: Cincy is as statistically dominant across the board as any team in the country: The offense is in the top 10 nationally and leads the Big East in passing yards, total yards and scoring, and leads the nation in pass efficiency; the defense leads the nation in tackles for loss and is second in sacks. The Bearcats have yet to finish with a negative turnover margin, have returned both a punt and a kickoff for touchdowns and haven't missed a beat with Zach Collaros in place of starting quarterback Tony Pike for the last two-and-a-half games. They're good at almost everything, and not bad at anything, as their margin of victory proves -- at 28.2 points per game, the Bearcats have wailed harder on their schedule to date than any other team except Texas (it's a tie).

Obviously, it's not the toughest road to nirvana. But if they run the table, the 'Cats will have about as good an overall set of road wins -- at Rutgers, at Oregon State and at South Florida already in the bag, none of them very close in the end, and at Pittsburgh still to come -- as any team this side of USC (at Ohio State, at Cal, at Notre Dame), and the Trojans are no longer in the discussion.

Disqualifier(s): Still, the lack of a really big fish above the mantel is a killer in the human polls, which are already inclined to turn up their noses at the Big East, and the overall schedule doesn't rank among the top 50 in any of the four computer polls that list strength of schedule numbers. It's not an awful schedule -- the only genuinely rotten games are against I-AA Southeast Missouri State and rebuilding MAC pushover Miami (Ohio), a traditional rival -- but of course there will be the requisite bloc of voters who scoff, "Cincinnati, humbug!" no matter what the numbers say on any stat sheet or computer printout, and it will be hard for Bearcat backers to persuade them by arguing, "But they beat Oregon State and Pittsburgh!"

Best-case scenario: The remaining schedule is tough enough to prevent the Bearcats from dropping significantly in any of the polls, and neither TCU nor Boise State has the juice on their remaining slates to overtake the Bearcats if they keep winning at their current pace; Cincinnati is not likely to fall without a loss or miraculous escape, and even a miraculous escape might be acceptable if it comes against West Virginia or Pitt. That leaves only two obstacles to the top: A loss by Iowa (the Hawkeyes still have to play at Ohio State) and two losses among the Florida-Alabama-Texas troika, which would leave the Bearcats ranked No. 2 among undefeated teams.

The question is whether that would be good enough to rise to No. 2 overall above a one-loss Florida or Alabama, or, from the back of the pack, one-loss Oregon, the one team currently sitting behind the Bearcats with the profile and potential to make a serious run down the stretch if the Ducks keep up the scorched-earth act of the last month. The other possible interloper: LSU. If the Tigers upset Alabama Saturday and run the table through an SEC Championship upset over Florida, they'll almost certainly jump the Bearcats. Otherwise, though, if Texas and Iowa lose somewhere along the way, it's much harder to see the loser of the SEC title game remaining in one of the top two spots if Cincy dispatches a quality Pitt outfit on the same day.

Level of fantasy: Finalist on American Idol. No one thought they had a chance at the start of this thing, when the Bearcats were just one face among many, but now that they're here, there's a fighting chance: As the BCS lines up in the moment, Cincinnati is third in line for the No. 2 spot behind Texas and Iowa, and the only team with a realistic chance of skipping UC in the line is LSU. If they keep winning, not many dominoes have to fall to move the 'Cats into at least a 50/50 argument for the second championship slot.