Morrison, Oral Roberts ride 11-game win streak

TULSA, Okla. — Wearing all white from their T-shirts to their face paint, the student section belts out a chant to back up the players at Oral Roberts: "I believe that we will win."

Lately, the Golden Eagles are giving them plenty of reasons.

Behind high-scoring forward Dominique Morrison and a veteran supporting cast, ORU (18-4, 10-0 Summit League) has won 11 straight games to put itself in an unusual position. In a conference where NCAA tournament berths usually hinge on a single game in March, the Golden Eagles are making a case for at-large consideration.

"I think there's a lot of mid-major teams that get overlooked," 13th-year head coach Scott Sutton said. "They think, 'Well, they play in the Summit or they play in the Colonial' or whatever. This team is very good.

"You make some of these teams come in here and play us, we're going to have a chance to beat them, and I think you can say that about a ton of mid-major teams."

Oral Roberts, which has 10 wins against BCS conference teams over the past decade, already scored an upset of then-No. 8 Xavier on Dec. 18 when the Musketeers had three players suspended because of a brawl against Cincinnati.

A season that started with the loss of backup point guard Ken Holdman to a season-ending injury and a buzzer-beater loss in the second game against Texas-San Antonio started to turn around against Arkansas-Little Rock on Dec. 12. Damen Bell-Holter capped a comeback from a 10-point second-half deficit by hitting a buzzer-beater from three-quarters court for a 58-55 victory.

Those two wins, along with another against Texas Tech, catapulted the Golden Eagles into conference play on a high and they haven't come down since. They swept the regular-season series with two-time defending conference champion Oakland (Mich.) with a 93-86 victory Saturday night, and they've already beaten every other Summit League opponent once.

The current roll has the Golden Eagles thinking about running the table in conference play and possibly getting a good enough seed in the NCAA tournament to do some damage.

"We don't want to lose a regular-season game, so probably — hopefully — if we did slip up in the conference tournament, we would probably get a shot at going to the NCAA tournament," said Warren Niles, who hit a career-best seven 3-pointers and scored 28 points in the win over Oakland.

"We want to win games from here on out. We don't want to lose any, because we're capable of winning all the games we've got from here on out."