🏀 2026-27 United Athletic Conference Preview 🏀 Team to watch: Central Arkansas. John Shulman inherited a 9-23 team two years ago and has it picked No. 1 heading into a brand-new league. The engine is Ty Robinson, an ASUN All-Freshman selection a year ago who averaged 14 points a game and chose to stay in Conway as the Bears make the jump from ASUN to the newly formed UAC. The defending champs: Austin Peay. The Govs won their first conference title in program history last season, and somehow it’s not the most notable thing about their offseason, it’s that they talked both of their stars out of testing the portal. Rashaud Marshall and Zyree Collins are two of just three players nationally to return as reigning all-conference selections for the same team, and together they accounted for over a third of Austin Peay’s scoring, rebounding and assists a year ago. Here’s the thing about this board’s First Team: two of the five picks barely played last season. Niko Bundalo was a five-star-caliber recruit at Ole Miss who scored his first career point in February as a buried freshman, and Kenneth Chime is a shot-blocking role player who averaged 5 points a game at West Georgia. Both are first-team picks on pure ceiling, not what actually happened on the floor last year, worth knowing since Little Rock’s Bradyn Hubbard (16.6 PPG at Abilene Christian) and Aaron Clark (15.3 PPG at Pepperdine) both outscored nearly everyone on this board and are sitting on the Second Team. Storylines worth watching: - Central Arkansas trying to prove last year’s turnaround was the new standard, not a one-year leap, in a conference that’s now unfamiliar territory for everyone. - Austin Peay defending its first title ever, with the rare luxury of returning both stars who won it. - Whether Bundalo’s recruiting pedigree translates immediately at UT Arlington after a lost freshman year at Ole Miss. - Little Rock quietly building one of the league’s most productive backcourts with two high-major-level scoring transfers nobody’s talking about yet. Player who can’t be ignored: Rashaud Marshall. He shot 65.6% from the floor last season, the second-best single-season mark in Austin Peay history, and turned down the chance to test the portal after becoming the engine of a program that had never won a title before last year. With Collins running the point next to him, the Govs have as complete a returning duo as anyone in the league. Fun fact: Central Arkansas and Austin Peay are both walking into the UAC off the two best seasons in their respective program histories, from completely opposite starting points, one a total rebuild, the other a decades-long program finally breaking through. The two best stories in the league are on a collision course for the top spot.