You could see it coming. Each escape -- increasingly narrow -- felt like a harbinger of a greater collapse to come. And sure enough, at home against a 6-19 squad, Syracuse blew a 13-point lead in the second half to fall to Boston College on Wednesday. One moment, the Orange were undefeated. The next, they were supremely vulnerable.

It wasn’t hard to fathom the resulting reaction: visions of Syracuse failing to make it out of the NCAA tourney’s first weekend. It sure seems possible given the way the Orange have played of late. But is it valid? If only there were some beacon of truth, some mystical force, an oracle of sorts capable of peering through Syracuse’s muddled present to present a clear picture of the future.

Oh, right. This is a job for the Giant Killers model. So, is Syracuse Cinderella-proof?

As Syracuse heads to Duke on Saturday, it suddenly seems like referendum time for the Orange. And while some concerns -- depth, defensive rebounding, perimeter shooting -- are legit in examining their Final Four odds, there is nothing to suggest that Syracuse is in trouble in the early rounds of the tourney. In fact, our model suggests just the opposite.

The Orange have the second highest Giant rating of any team in the country, to the point where they should beat a generic Giant Killer (or GK) 97.8 percent of the time. And it’s not because they are some sort of juggernaut. Our model evaluates teams in two different ways: based on their overall strength and how similarly they resemble historical Giants and Killers. According to the model’s power ranking, Syracuse is only the 13th-best team in the country. But the Orange get a major boost from the highest “Secret Sauce” of any potential Giant this season.

What does that mean? The Orange do the things a strong top seed is supposed to do. They force turnovers (23 percent of opponents’ possessions, 11th in the country) thanks to a 2-3 zone that is far more active than the typical narrative indicates. They grab offensive boards (38.9 percent of misses, 11th nationally). And they keep foes off the line. They’d be even stronger if they didn’t struggle so mightily on the defensive boards, which is the zone’s true weakness. Opponents grab 32.3 percent of their own misses, which is higher than average, and that figure rises to 34 percent in conference games.

But Syracuse can survive against a Giant Killer whose only weapon is offensive rebounding. And it can beat a mid-major despite some of the other flaws that have emerged over the past couple of weeks. Still, those issues are real and worth watching against Duke. Fact is, beyond Trevor Cooney, this is a poor 3-point shooting squad. No one else averages even one made trey per game, and only Tyler Ennis (36.4 percent) connects at a reasonably accurate rate. Considering that the Orange get very little offense from Rakeem Christmas and Baye-Moussa Keita in the middle, that puts a huge premium on Ennis to find his mates for easy baskets and on C.J. Fair and Jerami Grant to score efficiently and get to the foul line.

Those are high-class problems, though. Sure, Syracuse fans should be alarmed that those issues -- which were evident prior to the season -- have cropped up as the sample size of games has grown. The Orange might not be good enough to reach the Final Four. They might not be good enough to win at Cameron on Saturday. But they’re as safe a bet as any team in the country against a Giant Killer. It is unlikely they'll suffer an abrupt exit during the NCAA tournament's first weekend.