No. 1 national seed Wake Forest was expected to make it to the College World Series.
Oral Roberts? Not so much.
Yet it’s on to Omaha for the Golden Eagles, who certainly look the part of a team deserving to be among the final eight in the NCAA Tournament after going on the road and sweeping through regionals and then winning a three-game super regional against Oregon.
ORU is the lowest seed to reach the CWS since Stony Brook in 2012. The feat is reminiscent of ORU’s run to the Sweet 16 in the 2021 NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
Now the team from the small evangelical school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, will head to Omaha, Nebraska, to play TCU on Saturday at Charles Schwab Field. Oral Roberts’ only other CWS appearance was in 1978, when the team was known as the Titans and played as an independent.
“We’re going to let it fly here in a week,” coach Ryan Folmar said after his team’s 11-6 win Sunday night. “We knew we had a good club coming into the year. We continued to get better and better and better, and we’re playing well at the right time of year. We get an opportunity to keep playing, and that’s pretty fun.”
ORU has never been an easy out in the NCAA Tournament, but this team, out of the low-major Summit League, has overachieved against big-money baseball schools.
The Golden Eagles were a No. 4 regional seed and beat Oklahoma State, Washington and Dallas Baptist to advance to play the Pac-12 Tournament champion Ducks.
After blowing an eight-run lead and losing the super regional opener — ending their 21-game win streak — they rallied in the ninth inning for a walk-off victory Saturday and came back Sunday to knock out the Ducks.
ORU and TCU are joined in the CWS field by Wake Forest, No. 2 Florida, No. 5 LSU and No. 7 Virginia.
The eight-team field will be complete after a pair of Game 3s on Monday. Tennessee will play at Southern Mississippi and Texas visits Stanford looking to secure a third straight CWS.
Wake Forest is headed to the CWS for the first time since it won the national championship in 1955, and the Demon Deacons will bring the hottest offense in the country.
The Demon Deacons tied the NCAA Tournament record with nine home runs in their super regional-clinching 22-5 win over Alabama, and they are the first team since LSU in 1997 to have won four tournament games by double digits.
“We’ve had high expectations all year — No. 2 ranked, No. 1 ranked,” coach Tom Walter said. “The higher the expectations got, the more these guys showed up.”
Nick Kurtz and Brock Wilken hit back-to-back homers in the first inning, and Wilken connected again for the first of three third-inning homers that put Wake Forest up 10-3. Wilken’s homer in the ninth gave him 30 for the season and an ACC-record 70 in his career.
