Aggies need win over Eagles for titleBy Jeff Mills
jeff.mills@news-record.com
Posted: Saturday, November 22, 2014 3:55 am
GREENSBORO— Win or lose today, these Aggies have earned championship rings.
N.C. A&T (9-2,6-1MEAC) plays old rival N.C. Central (6-5,5-2) in the 86th Aggie-Eagle Classic at 2 p.m. at O'Kelly-Riddick Stadium in Durham.
If A&T beats Central, then the Aggies win the MEAC title outright and earn the league's automatic berth in the FCS playoffs. If the Aggies lose, they finish in a first-place tie.
Either way, it's a championship.
Think about that for a moment. Let it sink in.Jewelry for a program that lost 27 games in a row from 2005 through 2007, a program that was 1-10 in 2010, a program saddled with NCAA penalties because of a woeful Academic Progress Rate performance.
"It's not a miracle," A&T's athletics director Earl Hilton said. "But it's close."
The turnaround started when A&T hired coach Rod Broadway away from a championship-caliber team at Grambling.
"I go to football practice a lot," Hilton said. "I look around and soak it in. It's staggering to consider the progress (Broadway), his coaching staff and our students have made. And to think it's only been four years — just staggering."
Broadway was hired in February 2011, after national signing day, and arrived without a recruiting class.
He knew the history. He knew a rebuilding project awaited him.
He knew. Sort of.
"Actually, I didn't realize it was as bad as it was," Broadway said. "There was a time — there were a number of times — when I questioned my sanity for being here."
The Broadway Era began with fewer than 30 scholarship players on the roster.
NCAA penalties cut practice time to 16 hours per week. Penalties took away spring football, limited A&T on the number of scholarships it could
offer, limited the number of initial qualifiers it could bring in.
"It was courageous of Coach Broadway to take this on," Hilton said. "All he had was my promise that we would put attention and resources in place to be successful. It was an act of faith.
"There was no guarantee we would be able to do this."
Broadway's Aggies went 5-6 that first season, scratching out victories with walk-ons, smoke and mirrors.
A&T improved to 7-4 in the second season, went 7-4 again last year and heads into today's game with nine victories for just the third time in the last 16 years.
The other two teams — Bill Hayes' team went 11-2 in 1999 and George Small's team was 10-3 in 2003 — both won outright MEAC championships.
"Last year, we had a chance to win nine ball-games, and we let two easy ones slip away from us," Broadway said. "I thought we were a better football team this year, even though we lost a lot of guys defensively, especially in the secondary.... I think this is the most talented team we've had. And next year, I think we'll be even better.
"We're in a good spot now."
That's true. Because the improvement has come off the field, too. A&T posted APR figures of 944 and 948 in Broadway's first two seasons. Figures for the third season are due out in the spring, and the school expects the upward trend to continue.
Classroom work rid the Aggies of NCAA penalties. Broadway has a full complement of 63 scholarships to work with now, although this year's team has "six or seven" fewer than that on the roster, Hilton said.
It's a young roster, with only eight seniors. Three of them — left guard Willie Ray Robinson, center R.J. Canty and linebacker D'Vonte Grant — are starters on a championship team who suffered through the 1-10 season as redshirt freshmen.
With the cupboard bare, those three played right away for Broadway's first team.
"It was awesome to be on the field, but I had so much to learn," Grant said. "That first year was all about getting the fundamentals down, learning what the coaches want, learning the priorities.... Now it's about learning how to finish and how to become champions. They didn't preach that much my first year because we weren't ready. We were bad."
Now they're good.
These Aggies field the No. 3 scoring defense in the nation. They lead the MEAC in scoring with a speedy offense led by sophomore running back Tarik Cohen — the first A&T player to rush for more than 1,000 yards as a freshman and sophomore.
They found out they would clinch at least a share of a championship when the score from another game was announced over the P.A. system last week at Savannah State.
"I'm sure our guys knew what that meant," Broadway said. "These are college guys. They're smart, and they follow this stuff closer than I do. They understand the position they're in.... I wish you could've seen the joy on their faces in the locker room. You can't buy that. That's special."
And yet, Broadway still considers A&T a rebuilding project. The job has aged him, he said, pointing to bags under his eyes and graying hair as proof.
Championship or not, work remains to be done.
"No, we have not arrived. You never really arrive," Broadway said. "We're still building. We really only have three (full) classes: freshman, sophomores and juniors. We're a class short. I'm looking forward to the day when we have five classes — four classes, plus a redshirt class. That's when we're going to really get good.
"If we do it right, we have the opportunity to be good for a long time. If we continue to recruit well and make good decisions, recruiting the right kind of kids.... It's definitely a much better place to be than it was four years ago, but we're not finished. We've got a lot of stuff left to do. We've got a lot of building to do, a lot of recruiting to do, and, hopefully, a lot winning to do."
Contact Jeff Mills at (336) 373-7024, and follow @jeffmillsnr on Twitter.
A&T AT N.C. CENTRAL2 p.m. today
From the Greensboro News-Record: www.news-record.com/aggies-need-win-over-eagles-for-title/article_2362e5a2-d715-5d8c-8b36-6c39f0bdc77c.html?mode=print