College Basketball season is back in Charlottesville, and the No.9 Virginia Cavaliers got off to a good start to the year by beating Drexel by 29 points. Ryan Odom's team smothered Drexel in the first half and then cruised in the second half to a season-opening victory. The UVA non-conference schedule is going to heat up soon, but this was a chance for UVA to ease into the season and get a strong victory right out of the gate.

When looking at the result of Tuesday's game, whose stock is up and whose is down?

Stock up: Thijs de Ridder

The preseason pick for ACC player of the year had his stock rise in the season-opening game against a poor mid-major team?

Yes.

De Ridder was that good on Tuesday, both as a scorer and an initiator in the offense and was the best player on the floor for the Hoos. He finished the game with 24 points on 9-for-15 shooting as well as nine rebounds, two steals, and a block. He only had to play 27 minutes to get that stat line and it was the kind of start that UVA fans were wanting to see from their best player.

Stock down: Chance Mallory

I believe that Mallory is going to have a really strong season for Virginia, but it was a bit of a turnover fest for him on Tuesday.

Mallory did not have a strong night in other areas to offset his turnover problems. He shot 2-for-7 from the field for eight points, but he had six turnovers accounting for nearly half of UVA's turnovers. He is going to be the lead guard of this team and his talent is through the roof, but he will need to take better care of the ball moving forward.

Stock up: Sam Lewis

Lewis was the last of UVA's returning players to announce that he was going to be back this season and he is off to an impressive start to the 2026-2027 campaign.

Lewis finished as the second leading scorer in the game, with 20 points on 6-for-12 shooting, including a 4-for-6 mark from three, as well as having four rebounds and three assists. As a whole, Virginia struggled a bit shooting the basketball, but Lewis had a nice night and it was a great start to the season.

Stock down: UVA's bench

It is just one game, but it was not a great start to the UVA bench.

They scored only 21 points and there were no standout performances. Christian Harmon did not score in six minutes, Jurian Dixon had seven, Elijah Gertrude had eight, and Kalu Anya had two points. A lot of players did not play a heavy dose of minutes, but this is something that I am going to be monitoring over the next few games, especially when UVA faces stiffer competition.

Stock up: UVA's ability to force turnovers

When you turn the ball over as a team 14 times and still finish as a +7 in turnover margin, that means you had a great night on the defensive end.

Virginia was able to force Drexel into 21 turnovers on the night, with 18 of them being steals. It was something that Odom talked about at length after the game:

"I like the aggressiveness. I was hoping for more at the beginning of the second half, and we didn't really see it. You have to give Drexel credit — they came out and were more physical, and we settled for poor shots and weren't great in the half court. And we certainly have got to get we got to get better there. We can't play that way out of halftime when we played a pretty good half overall. Got to be able to to do it again. And thankfully, the guys did a nice job to to finish it out."