Coach Rags starts N.C. A&T four-game season with a bang

GREENSBORO, N.C. -- George Ragsdale walked onto the field early Saturday wearing a floppy rain hat and a rumpled look. He looked like he'd been doing it all his life, and he had in a sense. Ragsdale looked like he was part of the furniture at Aggie Stadium. The soft rain shrouded the field like gauze, making for a gloomy ambience for the first game of the rest of the season for N.C. A&T. Ragsdale was smiling.

A&T held off Howard 21-20 Saturday afternoon to win its first conference game in three years and set off a wild celebration among players and fans and one happy interim coach. "Coach Rags didn't play a down," he said. "Not one down did coach Ragsdale play. What I did was try to motivate and encourage them to play every down."

He meant the players and the fans and the alumni and everyone else who walked into the stadium unsure of what was about to happen. As it turned out, they needed everybody and every down to win the kind of game A&T has been losing for the past three seasons. The game came at the end of a long week for the Aggies and at the beginning of what Ragsdale and the athletics community here declared the beginning of a brand-new, four-game season. Lee Fobbs, the third-year head coach at A&T, was fired Monday morning after the worst era in school history. He was fired after six straight losses, a losing streak that gave him a three-year record of 2-28 that demoralized the team and its fans.

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