COLLEGE STATION, Texas -- Texas A&M's 32-point victory wasn't enough to satisfy coach Billy Gillispie.
The No. 13 Aggies beat Prairie View A&M 81-49 on Friday night in the season opener for both teams.
"We stayed on 77 (points) for like a month," he said. "Each individual play is what we're trying to look for because you won't have that big a margin normally. Players can't understand that, but every possession is critical. Regardless of what the score is I didn't think we did a great job of once we got a lead of being able to extend the lead like we should have."
Big men Joseph Jones and Antanas Kavaliauskas led the way with 16 points apiece for the Aggies.
Texas A&M, which entered the season ranked for the first time since 1980, won its seventh straight home opener.
Jones and Kavaliauskas, who are both 6-foot-9, were too much for the smallish Panthers and they had no trouble hitting easy shots under the basket throughout the game.
It was the first work of the season for Jones, who missed Texas A&M's exhibition season with tendinitis. Acie Law, last season's leading scorer, added eight points and had three assists in his return after sitting out of the last exhibition game because of a bruised tailbone.
Jones said he felt fine, but he too was disappointed after the game.
"When we you win most of the time you feel happy and you're jumping around and things," he said. "But we won tonight and we went in that locker room, heads all down. Because we weren't happy with how we performed as a team. We felt like there were certain things that we know how to do that we just didn't do."
Texas A&M led 44-21 at halftime and hot shooting by Jones in the first five minutes of the second half quickly pushed the lead to 30. He scored half of his points in that span and finished the run with a dunk on a put-back.
The Aggies led by as many as 35 points in the second half and Prairie View wouldn't get within 30 points the rest of the way.
The game was a mismatch from the start, with the Aggies scoring the game's first 13 points. Prairie View got on the board on a two-handed dunk by Johnny Cobb with about 16 minutes left in the first half.
The dunk didn't do much to get the Panthers going and A&M went on a 13-3 run fueled by six points by Law to lead 26-5 midway through the first half.
The Panthers committed 30 turnovers and made just 14 of 45 shots. They seemed overwhelmed by Texas A&M and often badly missed their shots.
The Texas A&M starters played about half of the game, sitting out intermittently throughout the first and second halves.
Andy Genao led the Panthers with 13 points and three assists and Cobb added seven points.
It was a good first game for the Aggies, who are trying to build off of last year's performance when they got their first NCAA tournament berth since 1987. Texas A&M lost to Final Four-bound LSU on a last-second 3-pointer in the second round.
But Gillispie doesn't want his team to be content with what they've already accomplished. He's looking for much more.
"We haven't completed anything," he said. "We haven't hung any banners yet that say champions on them. That's what we're trying to do and we have a long ways to go."
Texas A&M's Chinemelu Elonu had 12 points and provided some of the most exciting moments of the night. The freshman had two dunks and drew a standing ovation when he surprised Jared Ellison from behind to swipe away his layup on a fast break late in the first half.
Heralded freshman Donald Sloan scored eight points and showed that he's not afraid to hustle as he twice slid across the court while fighting for loose balls.
The Panthers, who won just five games last season, drop to 0-8 all-time against Texas A&M.
Texas A&M's Marlon Pompey, a starter from last season, didn't play on Friday. After the game Gillispie announced that he has a stress fracture in his right ankle and will be out 4-6 weeks.
The opening night record crowd of 10,722 included former President George H.W. Bush, his wife, Barbara, and Texas A&M president Robert Gates, who was nominated this week to replace Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense. The old record of 6,929 was set two years ago.
