North Carolina A&T goes to L.A. seeking relief

N.C. A&T, riding a 17-game skid, meets Prairie View A&M, once home to an 80-game losing streak.

By Rob Daniels, Greensboro News-Record

This may be an omen, you know. The N.C. A&T football team is trying to break a 17-game losing streak, and who stands in the Aggies' way? The winner of all losers, of course.

From 1989-98, Prairie View A&M set a record for ineptitude so grand it's nearly twice as long as its nearest, um, competitor: 80 in a row.

When the Aggies and the Panthers face off in the second Angel City Classic Saturday at the Los Angeles Coliseum (5:30 p.m. EDT), A&T will discover it's playing a very reasonable facsimile of a Division I-AA/NCAA FCS football team. It took them a while, but the Panthers, who beat SWAC rival Texas Southern in their opener, can compete.

In retrospect, the Panthers' streak was somewhat understandable. The school didn't have a full-time athletics director until 1998. Immediately before then, the post was held by a full-time professor who doubled as an assistant track coach.

Prairie View (Texas) surpassed Columbia's NCAA mark of 44 consecutive defeats in November 1994 with a 70-20 homecoming loss to Division II Tarleton State, and the Panthers kept on going. But to their credit, they didn't disband the program or even drop in classification.

Eventually, a joint effort of alumni and the supervisory Texas A&M University System helped ease the Panthers into the mainstream. The university voted in 2003 to initiate a student athletics fee of up to $300 per student per academic year. That's not as hefty as A&T's figure of $376, but it provided a start. Prairie View's football spending ranked eighth in the 10-team SWAC in 2005-06, the most recent year for which such records are available.

In 2004, the school hired Henry Frazier III, who had done a reclamation job at Division II Bowie (Md.) State, as its coach. While the Panthers haven't contended for the SWAC title, they did manage three wins a year ago, and Frazier said they were fewer than 10 plays from being 8-2.

That's a common lament of teams that suffer close losses, but it does suggest the Panthers have liberated themselves from the joke rotation of late night talk-show hosts.

A&T doesn't want to get any closer to that level than it already is. The Aggies' string is in a 13th-place tie on the NCAA's list of ignominy, but only three defeats short of fifth. The Aggies just passed Siena, which lost 16 in a row from 1994-96. On the horizon stands Canisius, which suffered 24 consecutive defeats before ending the fourth-longest skid Oct. 13, 2001. The Golden Griffins won at Siena that day. By January 2004, both programs were gone, conveniently sacrificed in the name of cost-cutting.

There's no threat of that at A&T, but the Aggies are undeniably tired of this line of discussion. To stop it, they'll need at least one big special-teams play, a turnover-free afternoon and more consistent blocking than they displayed in last week's season-opening loss at Winston-Salem State. That defeat was still more competitive than any game they played last year.

A crowd of 25,000 is expected for the contest, which is run jointly out of Los Angeles and Texas and which seeks to expose Southern California to Historically Black Colleges and Universities, few of which are west of the Mississippi.