It's not the publications I'm concerned about, it's the GRE score. With 155V/164Q, I'm pretty average-ish for engineering, but I was hoping to get 90th+ percentile for both sections. Had that happened, I would have applied to schools like Caltech, Princeton, and Berkeley for combustion, but since I don't want to take the GRE a second time and study for it I'll settle for the other middle tier schools.
I did swap ASU for USC, however. Both professors I was interested in working with at ASU are no longer taking students, so I've added USC to the mix.