Four top-25 teams lost to unranked opponents last week, and another three have gone down within the past 48 hours. With conference standings, projected brackets and fans’ guts all churning, you don’t need us to tell you that the best programs in college basketball this season are a tightly bunched, volatile group. But our Giant Killers project can show you which highly rated teams are likely to fall away from the pack in March.

For 11 years, we have refined a statistical model to find traits common to deep underdogs that pull off big upsets and heavy favorites that lose in the NCAA tournament. We’ll get deeper into the metrics in the coming weeks, but basically, over the years, we have found that successful Cinderellas tend to play high-risk, high-reward styles, increasing the variability of their scoring. Conversely, winning overdogs must choke off opponents’ risk-taking. They need to keep the ball by winning rebounding and turnover battles, and they must limit the damage of opponents’ pressure and long-range shooting. And just as these lessons led us to focus on Iowa State and Kansas last year, they are already spotlighting vulnerabilities among would-be contenders this season.

Here, then, are five giants who could play Goliath if the right David comes along in March.