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GREENSBORO -- Another season, another N.C. A&T football coaching change.

For the fourth time in six years, the Aggies will bring in a coach to try to get the football program back to where it was, back to the days when A&T could count on winning games and coaches could count on keeping their jobs as long as the alumni stayed faithful.

Those days really existed at A&T. You just have to go back a ways to recall them.

That was back before they fired Bill Hayes, back when Bert Piggot and Hornsby Howell ran things, back when coaching changes were made logically and the administration stayed out of the way.

Well, that might not have ever been the case, but there was a time when coaches at A&T just seemed to coast to the end and hand the ball off to another, who then won his share of games before giving way to still another era and another coach and another season. There was a logic to it, even as A&T went through natural ups and downs, back when men such as Howell and Hayes ran the program the way they wanted and no one outside of the football people even understood how they did it.

Wheeler Brown remembers those days. He played at A&T for Howell and wondered where the good times had gone. The short answer is they were run off to places like N.C. Central and Florida A&M. The long version is more complicated.

Brown, now the athletics director without the interim tag, said Monday he will look for a coach who can restore A&T football to its proper place.

"I expect our kids to get up off the ground," said Brown, who played on the first A&T team to win a MEAC title, back in 1975. "I'm not going to put it any plainer than that."

Brown has been around long enough to see six coaches come through the football offices, and he announced Monday that he'd decided a seventh was needed to get the Aggies through their 85th season of football at one of the country's oldest and proudest Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Brown said he relieved Lee Fobbs of his duties at about 7:30 a.m. Monday, then handed the team over to running backs coach George Ragsdale, a former Aggies running back himself and a respected figure within the A&T community.

"The program is in the very capable hands of George Ragsdale," Brown said. "I would hope (the community) would get behind him and support him 100 percent, get behind our kids and support our kids 100 percent, continue coming to the games with the same Aggie pride and Aggie fever that they've come with in the past."

Brown said the decision was made in part because of Fobbs' inability to move the program forward after two straight winless seasons and in part because the community had become exasperated with the program and in part because it had become an embarrassment to the past successes at A&T.

"Mostly, it was about the kids," he said.

As a former player, Brown said he could see it in the posture of the players and in their work ethic. He said that alone made him end the tenure of Fobbs and hand the program to an interim coach for four games. Then, he said, another search will begin.

Brown said he has a short list of names, as all ADs are expected to have, and it would be the basis of a search he hoped would be completed by the end of the year by a small committee of A&T people, including himself.

Of course, A&T's people have been known to turn on their football coaches suddenly and with great consequences. Hayes, the winningest coach in school history, was fired after a 4-8 season that everyone knew was a rebuilding year. George Small, a former Aggies player, took the very next team to the NCAA Division I-AA playoffs, but was gone two years later. Fobbs was given 30 games, 28 of them losses.

Brown said he'd seen enough. A perplexing decision not to go for two points after a touchdown against Central three weeks ago started the process, many believe. That was followed by a shocking homecoming loss to Morgan State in which A&T went from a 10-3 halftime deficit to a 41-3 defeat. Then came the 42-7 loss Saturday at Del State, a game that started with a failed onside kick by A&T that fueled the anger of Aggies everywhere.

"Coach naturally was disappointed," Brown said. "He's tried his best to get it done. Naturally, when you feel that you haven't completed a goal that you set for yourself there's some disappointment there. He felt that disappointment. At the same time, he could understand why we were making the move. We parted as friends."

That hasn't always been the case here. And the partings have sometimes carried periods of reckoning. But the fact is, there's never been a period like this at A&T, and it didn't start with Fobbs.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com