Thundering Herd

Marshall fielded a team on 14 November 1970. A chartered jet carrying the Thundering Herd home from a loss at East Carolina clipped trees short of the Huntington runway, killing all 75 aboard — players, coaches, boosters, the flight crew. The university considered dropping football. It did not, and Jack Lengyel arrived the following year to rebuild a roster from freshmen and walk-ons.

The program itself dates to 1895, decades before the crash, and the nickname came later still — coined by sportswriter Duke Ridgley in 1925 after Zane Grey's novel, then locked in by student vote in 1965 along with the Kelly green, white and black still worn today.

Recovery, when it came, took time. Marshall did not return to a conference championship until the Southern Conference titles of the late 1980s and 1990s, then moved into the Mid-American Conference and won it five times between 1997 and 2002. Division I-AA national titles followed in 1992 and 1996, either side of the MAC run. More recently the Herd have taken a Conference USA championship in 2014 and a Sun Belt title in 2024, moving conferences twice without a long stretch out of contention.

Thirteen bowl wins sit on the record, from three straight Motor City Bowls at the turn of the century to the Myrtle Beach Bowl in 2022. None of it draws a crowd quite like the Friends of Coal Bowl against West Virginia, the rivalry that still matters most in a state with only the two major programmes to argue over.

Every home season still opens in the shadow of 1970 — the players who never made it back from Kinston.