For those people who believed that A&T needed to call off the dogs against West Virginia State, leading 42-0 at halftime of Saturday night’s game, Coach Rod Broadway did exactly that. It just didn’t matter.

They threw only two passes in the second half and ran four basic running plays the entire second half. It really didn’t matter. A&T was playing its third and fourth string for 20 of the final 30 minutes of the second half. That didn’t really matter either.

The Aggies took knees deep inside WVSU territory in order to avoid scoring again and even tried to give the ball back to WVSU on downs and just stood around on offense to try to hurry up the clock. That still didn’t matter. None of it ever really mattered.

The truth is what did the matter was that West Virginia State never stood a chance once they stepped on bus and left Institution, WV and headed south last Friday for Greensboro.

The annihilation began less than 3 minutes in and A&T never looked back in setting a school record for points and margin of victory by simply pounding the hapless Yellow Jackets 77-0.

If Broadway had not shown any mercy at all, the scoring easily would have been well over 100 points but given the beatings that inferior teams have been taking for guaranteed pay on the national stage in this still brand new season what would have been the point.

The Aggies were bigger, stronger, faster, and play at a speed that few D-II teams are capable of matching. The talent gap was indeed that large and one sided.

The game was clearly a tune up for an A&T team that was almost at full strength after leaving a number of key players behind in its opening 29-13 loss to Coastal Carolina a week ago.

Granted WVSU is by no means a CCU but they were to be a respectable foe or least appeared to be that way after dispatching traditional CIAA member and last year’s Pioneer Bowl winner Johnson C. Smith 34-31 just the week before.

Smith has a veteran team back this year so logically speaking this was supposed to be a competitive game for at least maybe a half. That scenario never materialized. The Aggies scored in every way imaginable and thankfully for the Yellow Jackets had three touchdowns called back on penalties.

While not trying to equate A&T’s FCS status to that of BCS member Oklahoma State’s 84-0 beating of Savannah St of two weeks ago, there were distinct similarities in the mistakes and miscues that were made by the smaller school which made it so terribly tough to stay interested and awfully tough to watch.

So what does A&T gain from a 77-0 walk in the park against a teams like WVSU and next week against Virginia University ofLynchburg where score could possibly get out hand even quicker than last week?

Well first, you get a lot of practice time to develop your second and third teamers a lot more than you ever would during the conference schedule. There is also usually plenty of work done that can be done on perfecting your kickoff and punt coverage and special team players under game conditions, something that a coach can never do fully in pure practice environment.

It gives your coaching staff a chance to really polish their game calls and situational schemes with the clear understanding that you have some margin for error because your opponents are probably not going to equipped to take real advantage of your mistakes barring something totally out of the ordinary.

Another major thing is it allows for the offense to learn and to find their rhythm, quarterbacks to learn their receivers, to work on their check downs, to recognize coverages. It allows those young defensive players to know where they need to be and work to perfect their recognizing thier assignments in their sets.

These games give the offensive line sufficient work to jell as a cohesive unit in picking up blitzes and stunts that they will later in the year albeit the athletes they are facing in these games are not as fast or as physical as the ones they will see in October and November but the defensive packages will identical.

Football is football. And, contrary to Allen Iverson’s now infamous quote from the last decade, practice is not just practice for practice sake. If all things being fairly equal, good sound intense preparation will always be the difference between a 2-9 and 8-3 season.

If A&T can achieve this goal by playing WVSU or VUL then bring them on. They will just have to put on their big boy pants and play football. As Broadway remarked in his post game press conference,”It’s not my job to stop us.”

A&T will do what it has to do which is that it has to get better each week as a football team, develop a taste for placing the final dagger in deep when there is blood in the water early and to master the technique of making your opponent pay when opportunities present themselves.

Lord knows if the shoe is on the other foot, teams in the MEAC have not and will not recognize any mercy rule when playing us.