AAC Basketball: Preseason rankings for 2019-20 season

Tulane is consistently projected as a team to finish at or near the bottom AAC in 2019-20, and it’s not hard to understand why; the school has only racked up four conference wins since the calendar turned to 2018, and it hasn’t finished higher than 10th since its first season in the American. They’re riding a 21-game losing streak entering this season, and a wave of transfers following the dismissal of Mike Dunleavy over the off-season has cost the program their four leading scorers from last year’s difficult campaign.

New coach Ron Hunter is undertaking a massive rebuild with the Wave, but it’s not a task with which the former IUPUI and Georgia State head coach is unfamiliar. The program’s first division one coach, Hunter brought IUPUI to its first ever tournament appearance in 2003 before building a Sun Belt powerhouse in Atlanta with Georgia State. Tulane fans should be hopeful for a brighter future under Hunter, but no one should be particularly surprised if they don’t find a way to win more than a couple of games in conference play this year.

Graduate transfers KJ Lawson and Christion Thompson will help fill some of Tulane’s scoring void this season, and there’s plenty of room for sophomore Kevin Zhang to break out in the big way many around the program hope he might. The recent news that Teshaun Hightower and Ibby Ali will be eligible this season projects the Wave just ahead of UCF for me, but dragging Tulane out of the AAC basement is going to be a multi-year project for the new coach.