Erik Brady

USA TODAY Sports

BUFFALO --- Will the real Syracuse University please stand up?

The Orange started the season 25-0 and soon enough were ranked No. 1 in all the land. Then they stumbled to the finish, losing five of their last seven games. And so the question pondered all around First Niagara Center Wednesday was which Syracuse would show up for Thursday's round-of-64 game against Western Michigan.

"It's a good question," Westwood One radio analyst Kevin Grevey told USA TODAY Sports. "Are they the 25-0 team that won with all those (last-second) game-winners? Or are they the 2-5 team that's had trouble making shots? There's something amiss there. They look vulnerable."

At his news conference, Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim was asked about being underestimated and coming in like "a wounded animal," a premise he promptly rejected.

"I don't even see it that way, and I don't really pay too much attention to that," he said, pointing out that the Orange lost four of their last five regular-season games last season before reaching the Big East championship game and then the Final Four.

"The tournament's a different thing," he said. "You can start playing well in one game, and all of a sudden, you can get on a roll. So I don't really look at it that way. I think we probably were overestimated a little bit when we were 25‑0."

CBS analyst Bill Raftery fully expects the Syracuse team that takes the court Thursday to live up to its No. 3 seed against the 14-seed Broncos.

"Jim's like all the great coaches," Raftery said. "Give them a few days off, and they figure things out. I may be crazy, but I really think Syracuse will play well. His offense just has to make some shots."

Boeheim made the case that the 25-0 Orange and the 2-5 Orange are not really all that different. He said it had more to do with the vagaries of the schedule and an injury near the end of the regular season to Jerami Grant, his leading rebounder, who is recovered.

"I don't think we played any differently at the end of the year than we played all year," Boeheim said. "We played at Virginia, at Duke. Nobody else won there in the league either. So that's fairly normal. We played at Virginia without Jerami Grant, and we played at Duke, and it came down to one play that maybe went the wrong way."

And here Boeheim grinned mischievously. He famously charged the court and got tossed out with a pair of technical fouls when Syracuse's C.J. Fair was called for charging with 10 seconds left in that game.

"But I think we've covered that play already this year," he deadpanned.

Boeheim said his team simply wasn't the same without Grant at Georgia Tech and that a banked-in three helped North Carolina State beat the Orange in the ACC tournament.

"We played pretty much the same all year long," Boeheim said. "The way the schedule's set up and the way with Jerami going down, that's part of why the finish was what it was. But I don't see any difference in the way we're playing or the way we're practicing."

Fair was asked what team reminds him of Western Michigan. Fair answered Boston College. Left unsaid: That's the team that broke the 25-0 streak, best start and longest win streak in SU history.

"We can play from one game to six games and our goal is to play all six," Baye Moussa Keita said, meaning Syracuse could be ousted by Western Michigan or reach the national championship game.

"It's going to be a tough road because every team you play is one of the best in their division," Keita said. "Every team can beat you.

So we're just going to go ahead and play like it's our last game … because it could be our last basketball game in college."

Boeheim was in a reflective mood, more eager to discuss the distant past than the recent one. He talked about his first NCAA tournament team in 1977, pretending not to remember too much about it before adding vivid detail of an overtime upset of Tennessee. And when the news conference was done, a cluster of reporters surrounded him and he held court for 10 minutes more.

He talked about winning two Big East tournaments and losing early in the NCAA tournament --- and winning the national championship after losing big in the Big East tournament. "There's just not that much relationship to that stuff," he said. "People want to look at that, but I just don't see it."

Yes, his Orange were one-and-done in the ACC tournament, but Boeheim said they'd played well, they just didn't shoot well.

He took one more question: How are the Orange shooting now?

"We'll find out tomorrow about 2:45," he said, grinning again. "We're making some in practice, which is always a good thing."