Trying to be non biased, but a football UVA season ticket holder, repeated attendee at UVA BB games, son attended two degrees, alum with wife and other son, this not east!

UVA has skill, talented players, a future Hall of Fame coach, and OHIO is awesome with a great young coach! uVA is the defending champ, the PG was one of the reasons UVA made it so far then! Ohio is really good! Preston! But not just Preston, Wilson and Vander Plas are stars! But can they sustain against ACC - Bennett talent!

Listen I go back and forth on my bracket, given UVA ‘a Covid pause, I want to bet enough to give me a retirement, so who wins? Joking, not rich enough for such an investment!

We can win but they are favored by a touchdown for a reason. They are well coached, play a style we haven't had to face yet and have really good players. But they also aren't the type of offense that has given us problems this year. Also, Jason Preston is the type of player that has given them problems. Our chances will become clearer when we find out who is their missing player.

There's two possibilities. If it's Morsell, he's the least impactful of our bench rotation. If it's McKoy, he's probably the second least impactful in rotation. Either way, I don't expect the personnel loss to have much, if any, of an impact.

Yahoo sports has a story about Virginia "making the most of quarantine" before the tournament.
Talks about how they are dealing with the situation.

I agree. It was much more fun to sneak up on Georgetown in 2010 as the "ninth-best team from a mediocre conference" with a pair of lethal guards who'd just come into their own.

To answer the question directly, Virginia has to be thought of as having the better than 50/50 chance. People who are putting their money where their mouth is have Virginia by about 7. That's a fairly significant number.
Preston is a good player but they have two guys who are just as good. Guys like Wilson and BVP can get awards like third team all-MAC but all or nearly all of Virginia's bench was more highly recruited and are probably still just as good as they are.

13 seeds win about a little less than a quarter of the time. We might have a better chance than most others. They can't practice and might be missing a key player. As some have said this is a perfect storm. With a young team we played a couple of brilliant games early in the year against Illinois and Cleveland St. We had a middle part of the year plagued with injuries and COVID and finished fifth. We went through the MAC tournament like a Buzzsaw looking more like the team that showed up in Champaign. The world suddenly knows Preston's story. They finished first in a likely weaker than normal ACC and can't practice and might or might not be missing a key player. The talking heads who get paid as much to be entertaining as right eat this up because there is a lot to talk about. We absolutely can win. I'll be pulling for us to win. But even with all of the storylines Virginia has to be considered at least a minor favorite.

As to whom you should pick, it depends. Picking differently than the field gives you a better chance to finish both first and last. If you want to win sometimes a pick with a less than 50/50 probability can help your odds of finishing first. Given how many talking heads love this upset it probably is not the correct strategic pick in a lot of contests. It sounds like in your location that you might be in a pool made mostly of Virginia fans. In that case it might be a great pick if you want to try to finish first and do not care much about your chances of finishing last.

You’ve hit on the main facts so to me it comes down to whether we’re hot or not. If we can get them a little on their heels with a quick start, who knows what might happen, but otherwise the odds are stacked against us. Most analyses that I can find give us less than a 25% chance to win. My heart is with the Cats but my head says it going to be really tough to beat the ACC champs.

The line opened at 10.

The more hype that Ohio gets, the more disrespected Virginia must feel. Ohio has momentum in it's favor, but Virginia has quality talent across the board. Unfortunately, Virginia has been forced to quarantine, so I suspect that they will start the game rusty and a bit disjointed. The key will be whether Ohio can move in for the kill early and then hold Virginia off as they come raging back in the second half. Ohio will need to have people step up off the bench and in a big way. It will come down to the wire, and the winner is....

Yes, because the North always beats the South.