The exodus of basketball players at the end of a season has become a modern-day reality in the transfer-portal era, and Tulane is proving to be no exception.
Junior point guard Rowan Brumbaugh, a first-team All-American Conference selection in 2024-25 and a second-team pick this year, confirmed Monday night he was entering the portal while reiterating his statement from March he would apply for the NBA draft. He joined forward Scotty Middleton, who told The Field of 68 media network this past weekend he planned to enter the portal, and shooting guard Curtis Williams, whose agents informed ESPN’s Jeff Borzello last week he would enter the portal.
Tulane’s season ended with a 74-60 second-round defeat to Charlotte in the American tournament. The Green Wave (18-15, 8-10), which shockingly lost team leader and versatile center Gregg Glenn to a drowning in late July, started 3-0 in league play but struggled the rest of the way, finishing in a three-way tie for eighth.
Coach Ron Hunter will return for his eighth year, school sources confirmed a day after the Charlotte game, but he will have to rebuild his roster. The transfer portal opened Tuesday and will close April 21.
Brumbaugh, the preseason American player of the year, averaged team bests in points (19.2), assists (3.5), rebounds (4.9) and steals (1.6). He tied a career-high with 35 points on 10-of-15 shooting in a first-round tournament win against Memphis and added 25 points the next night against Charlotte, when he did not get much help from his teammates.
His scoring average was the Wave’s highest since Jerald Honeycutt’s 19.9 in 1996-97.
Brumbaugh began his career at Texas, where he redshirted in 2022-23, then spent one season at Georgetown before transferring to Tulane. He helped the Wave go 12-6 in the American in 2024-25 and reach the semifinals of the conference tournament, where it lost 78-77 to No. 1 seed and eventual champion Memphis in a heartbreaker.
Key players Kam Williams (Kentucky) and Kaleb Daniels (DePaul) transferred from that team, with Middleton and Williams entering as their marquee replacements.
Middleton, the No. 60 national recruit out of high school in 2023-24 according to 247 Sports, played one season at Ohio State and another at Seton Hall before arriving at Tulane as a junior. He averaged 6.9 points and 4.0 rebounds, struggling to find consistent offense. He lost his starting role at the end of January but immediately enjoyed a 10-game stretch in which he hit 22 of 40 3-point attempts.
Williams, who was rated the No. 79 national recruit out of high school in the 247 Sports composite, played his freshman year at Louisville and transferred to Georgetown as a sophomore before moving on to Tulane this past season. He started 32 of 33 games, averaging 12.4 points and 4.8 rebounds, but his performance was streaky. He had a season-high 32 points in an overtime victory against Boston College in November, then went four consecutive games without scoring in double figures around the turn of the calendar. He hit only 6 of 22 shots in the American tournament, finishing the season at 37.8%.
The three transfer departures would leave Tulane with only Tyler Ringgold as a full-time returning starter. Ringgold, a 6-foot-8 perimeter player who moved to center to fill the hole left by Glenn, averaged 9.4 points and 3.9 rebounds. Luke Rasmussen, a former walk-on who was on half scholarship, started 11 games late in the year and averaged 2.6 points.
Rebuilding nearly an entire roster is par for the course in the American, which lost a higher percentage of players to the transfer portal last season than any other conference. South Florida, which won the regular-season and tournament championships this year, returned only one player from 2024-25. Tulsa, which won 30 games and reached the NIT final, returned only one starter and two seldom-used reserves from 2024-25.
It will be up to Hunter to mine the portal for a cohesive team in his eighth season. Tulane has finished above .500 in conference play three times in the past five years after doing it once in 22 seasons before his arrival, but the Wave has not reached the NIT (last trip: 2000) or the NCAA tournament (last trip: 1995) under his watch.