If I was a Cincinnati fan, I'd be doubly concerned about tonight's visit from West Virginia, for one specific reason -- the defense collapsed for the first time all season last week against a very pedestrian attack from UConn, which rolled up 465 yards and 45 points, almost as many as the Bearcats allowed in their first four Big East games combined -- and one very vague, intangible one: At 9-0, in uncharted poll territory, off by far the most harrowing escape of the season, the sense that the clock is ticking dangerously near midnight must be growing more palpable with every win. The odds must have their say.

And West Virginia isn't a bad team to speak through here. The Mountaineers have been in the Bearcats' seat before, as a league frontrunner with big national dreams in front of them as a substantial home favorite late in the season, and are in much better position to crash Cincy's championship designs than Pitt was when the lame-duck Panthers spoiled WVU's apparent ascension to the BCS title game in the final hours of the regular season in 2007.

West Virginia still controls its own destiny in the conference race, with both of the current frontrunners (Cincinnati tonight and Pitt at Thanksgiving) still ahead on the schedule and the chance to at least briefly reassert the grip it seemed to have on the rest of the Big East before they fell back to the pack last season. Beyond the focus on all the Bearcats have to potentially lose, all of the Mountaineers' BCS ambitions are still on the table, too, along with the omnipresent threat of the most dangerous player on the field at any given moment, Noel Devine, who's far, far scarier than anyone UConn deployed to dice up the Cincy defense in the Huskies' 35-point second half last week.

All of that would be weighing pretty heavily on my mind if I was a Cincinnati fan, especially if I was one of the nervous types that wears a rabbit's foot and the same pair of socks and underwear during winning streaks. But outside of Bearcat paranoia, West Virginia is more like a team struggling to hold its season together than a more talented outit coming together at just the right time to rise up for a stretch run at the conference title. All three of WVU's Big East wins have come against the league's bottom dwellers, Syracuse, Louisville and UConn (combined Big East record: 1-12), all in Morgantown, the last two by surprisingly close margins, and the Mountaineers' one trip outside of the friendly confines of their home state since quarterback Jarrett Brown suffered a concussion in the Oct. 17 win over Marshall ended in a one-sided, 30-19 loss at South Florida -- just two weeks after Cincinnati dispatched the Bulls with relative ease on the same field. WVU's only other road game against a winning team, at Auburn in September, also ended an 11-point Mountaineer loss.

For a team still carrying the tag of a top-25 program, then, West Virginia has still done very little in nearly two full years under Bill Stewart to retain that label except generally not lose to teams it shouldn't. The Mountaineers haven't made a habit of sneaking up on anyone either -- since stunning Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl in Stewart's first game, they haven't beaten a ranked team and haven't won again as an underdog. Cincinnati has been far too balanced, consistent and resilient to expect either one of those streaks to end tonight.