Howard Answers Alabama A&M’s Late Rally to Win Ted White’s Coaching Debut

Ja’Shawn Scroggins Named MVP as Ted White Wins Howard Coaching Debut

Ted White won his first game as a college head coach in dramatic fashion Saturday night, as Howard beat Alabama A&M 31-24 in the Cricket MEAC/SWAC Challenge on ABC, a rare renewal of a series the two programs had not played since 1992. White’s Bison entered the day with an unsettled quarterback race between Isaiah Friedman, Ja’Shawn Scroggins and TJ Russell, and Scroggins made the choice look easy, throwing for 315 yards and three touchdowns to outduel Alabama A&M graduate quarterback Cornelius Brown IV, who passed for 254 yards and two scores and ran for a third.

Howard raced ahead 10-0 in the first quarter on a short touchdown pass to Markus Hopson and an 18-yard Matt Conord field goal, then extended the lead to 20-7 in the second quarter behind another Conord field goal and a 4-yard touchdown catch by Nathanial Clark. Alabama A&M answered both scores, tying neither but trimming the deficit twice on touchdown catches by Jarel Williams and Imari Conley, and the Bulldogs trailed only 20-14 at halftime after building a spark from a 43-yard Maurice Edwards run and a 43-yard Conley reception that set up their scores.

A Conord field goal in the third quarter pushed Howard’s lead to 23-14, but Alabama A&M’s Sam Shade, in his second season on the Hill, got his team all the way back. Brown capped an 11-play, 80-yard drive with a 4-yard touchdown run to make it 23-21, and David Faulk, the Preseason HBCU Boxtorow All-American the preview singled out, kicked a fourth-quarter field goal off a nine-play march to put the Bulldogs ahead 24-23 with 7:49 to go. Howard did not flinch. Scroggins led a six-play, 83-yard answer, hitting Osborne for a 51-yard touchdown with 2:41 remaining, and a two-point conversion pass to Clark made it 31-24, the final margin. Scroggins described the winning throw as an RPO that Alabama A&M met with a cover zero look. “I went through my footwork, saw press bail, and he ran his slant route,” Scroggins said. “After that, it was just, you know, something you don’t think about. It’s just something that happens.”

White credited a game plan built to attack what his staff saw as weaknesses in Alabama A&M’s defense, and a fast practice tempo that let Howard’s offense play ahead of the Bulldogs’ reactions early. He singled out Scroggins, who was named the game’s Most Valuable Player, for the composure he showed working through an offseason quarterback competition. “This guy right beside me, man, he has ice in his veins,” White said. “I’m hard on him, I’m very hard on him. I played the quarterback position, and he plays it the right way. It was a transition in the spring, and we spent a lot of time together. But you’re talking about one of the guys that’s going to be one of the Howard greats at quarterback.” Shade, for his part, put the loss on his own slow start. “We got off to a slow start, very slow,” he said. “We didn’t take our practices to the game for whatever reason, and that’s on myself and my coaching staff. We struggled with field position, a couple bad punts, almost like we were a little bit stage fright. But finally we found our way and started to battle back. They made one more play than we did late in the ball game.”

Howard’s defense also had its say, with Rodney Roane Jr. intercepting a pass and returning it 20 yards, part of a unit that forced two turnovers overall against an Alabama A&M offense that outrushed Howard 151 yards to 114 despite the loss. Howard’s ground game struggled at 2.9 yards per carry, but Scroggins and a receiving corps that included Zaden Jackson, Semaj Pierre and Antonio Hunter, a transfer the preview flagged as a newcomer to watch, made up the difference through the air. It was a signature debut for White, a Howard alumnus who had never been a college head coach before Saturday, in the 20th playing of an event the MEAC still leads 12-7 in the all-time series.