Post by krazykev on Oct 27, 2008 5:24:52 GMT -5
GREENSBORO -- 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.
The agonizing decision to fire Fobbs came with an easy decision of whom to turn to for the short season ahead.
Ragsdale is A&T football royalty, a running back from the mid-'70s who played under Hornsby Howell on the first MEAC championship team, becoming the school's all-time rushing leader after the 1975 championship season. He is still ninth on that list, having coached a couple of the players who broke his record.
Some 4,358 people walked into Aggie Stadium to see if Ragsdale could break the losing streak and win a conference game for the first time since 2005. They were looking for other things, too. They were looking for the energy sucked from the program since that day in 2005 when A&T was 3-3 and nothing suggested a looming disaster.
They walked in wearing rain gear and the burden of bad football, having seen the worst of times and wondering if they'd ever see the best of times again. They didn't need to see it all Saturday, just a hint that things could get better. They used to assume things couldn't get any worse.
And then things got worse than their worst nightmare.
Ragsdale put on his floppy hat and set out to change everything. He walked out with his team before the pregame workouts and walked in the wet grass as they stretched and ran through drills. He smiled and clapped as he worked his way through the lines, reassuring his interim team that all was well while his bulldog assistants ran the drills and did the dirty work of reminding them all that things certainly were not all well.
The roles changed Monday when he went from running backs coach to the man with the game plan, going from an assistant to head coach overnight and finding himself in charge of things assistants can only imagine.
Things like talking to the media and answering to the athletics director and the chancellor and, for that matter, everyone who'd ever worn the school colors, from the fans to the band to the players and coaches and teachers and administrators. Last week, he only worked for Fobbs. Saturday morning, he knew he worked for a lot more people than ever before.
Ragsdale tore a lot of pages out of the thick playbook and reduced the plan to a few plays. He called for runs and run blocking. He called for tackling and discipline and resilience. Mostly, he called for his team to win a game he knew it was capable of winning.
"We won this game Tuesday and Wednesday," he told his players. "The guys worked hard. I told them the game was already won. What they had to do was carry it out."
He told them all week he believed in them, told them hard work would eventually equal wins and left the rest to his assistants.
"All they need is somebody to believe in them and tell them that every now and then," Ragsdale said. "And sometimes when they make a mistake you've got to pat him on the head and quietly whisper in his ear 'Hey, get the damn job done.' "
Rags got the streak stopped Saturday. Now comes the hard part of getting the job done at A&T.
Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com
dayum, i didn't know! wtf!
