Box Score
ABILENE – After an inspiring first half, the out-manned and short-handed ACU Wildcats simply ran out of gas Thursday night as Oral Roberts dominated the second half in an 82-59 win in Southland Conference men's basketball action at Moody Coliseum.
The win drops the Wildcats to 6-11 overall and 0-3 in the Southland, while the win pushes the Golden Eagles to 9-8 and 3-1. ACU will be back in action Saturday at 3 p.m. when it hosts Central Arkansas at Moody Coliseum.
The Wildcats played without their two leading scorers -- junior guards
LaDarrien Williams and
Harrison Hawkins -- as well as junior forward Aleksander Milosavljevic and junior guard
Rafael Farley, leaving them with just eight players in uniform.
ACU played the Golden Eagles evenly throughout the first half, going to halftime with the game tied 39-39. But the second half belonged to ORU as it outscored ACU, 43-20. The Wildcats, in fact, scored just four points in the first 10:50 of the second half -- all on free throws -- and didn't hit their first shot from the field until
Julian Edmonson hit a driving layup with 9:09 left in the game. That cut the ORU lead to 59-45 as the Golden Eagles had already begun to pull away from the Wildcats.
The Oral Roberts lead grew to as many as 24 points (76-52) with 3:43 to play behind the league's leading scorer, Shawn Glover, who had 11 of his 25 points in the second half when the Golden Eagles took control of the contest.
ACU junior guard
Julian Edmonson led all scorers with a career-high 26 points in his first start for the Wildcats. Edmonson was 7 of 16 from the field and 10 of 10 from the free throw line.
Sophomore guard
Parker Wentz was the only other Wildcat in double figures as he finished with 11 points on 3 of 7 shooting (2 of 3 from 3-point range) from the field.
For more than one week, Thursday night's game was a forfeit win for the Wildcats because of a scheduling error by Oral Roberts. But after several programs across the country were dinged with the same violation, the NCAA granted an emergency waiver Thursday morning, taking the win away from the Wildcats and putting the two teams on the floor.
Thursday night's game marked the first time an NCAA Division I opponent has visited Moody Coliseum since Dec. 3, 1984, when the Wildcats knocked off Pepperdine.
