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| Chad Pennington |
Chad Pennington dropped back to pass, looking downfield for the best wide receiver in the college game – Randy Moss. It was the 1997 Motor City Bowl and Marshall University would end up on the short end of a 34-31 loss to Mississippi.
Moss would catch an 80-yard touchdown
pass from Pennington on Marshall’s
first play from scrimmage. For Marshall
fans, however, it would mark another beginning, one of an era of dominance in
which the Thundering Herd would win five Mid-American Conference championships
in six years.
Just 27 years earlier, Marshall
football almost ceased to exist.
On November 14, 1970, while returning
from a game at East Carolina, the Southern
Airways
flight carrying 75 passengers, including 37 players and five coaches of the Marshall
football team went down on a hillside outside of Huntington,
West Virginia.
Decision-makers at the university,
including acting President Donald Dedmon, contemplated what to do with the
football program. They wound up hiring Jack Lengyel, a Division III head coach
at Wooster College
in Ohio, to rebuild the program.
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| Randy Moss |
University officials pushed the NCAA for
a waiver that would allow freshmen to compete at the varsity level, which was
not permitted at that time. Lengyel, whose character was personified in the
film We Are Marshall by Matthew McConaughey, built his team from the
ground up, recruiting players from other sports and even advertising in the
school newspaper for a place-kicker.
Lengyel ended up winning just nine games
in four seasons as the futility of the Marshall
football program continued. Prior to “The Crash” (1966-69), the Herd had a
winless streak of 0-26-1. After joining the Southern Conference in 1977, Marshall
matched that dreadful streak before finally defeating Appalachian State, 17-10,
in 1981.
In 1984, under new head coach Stan
Parrish, Marshall experienced its
first winning season in two decades, finishing up at 6-5. What transpired over
the next 20 years was nothing short of amazing.
After Parrish led the Herd to two
winning seasons, Coach George Chaump brought national prominence to Marshall
at the Division I-AA level with back-to-back ten-win seasons and a trip to the
1987 national championship game.
The success of Chaump’s teams in the late
‘80s led to a period of dominance in the ‘90s. Marshall
won two NCAA Division I-AA championships, defeating Youngstown
State in 1992 and Montana
in 1996.
The following year (1997), Marshall
made the jump to Division I-A and became a member of the Mid-American
Conference. Head coach Bob Pruett, a former Marshall player, would lead the
Herd to five conference titles. During that stretch, the only team to beat Marshall
in a MAC championship game was Toledo
(2001).
From ‘96 to 2004, Marshall
won 94 games, which includes five bowl game victories. The Herd also had six
seasons in which it won at least 10 games.
Marshall’s
gridiron success of the ‘90s was made possible by those who weathered the storm
during the turbulent years following “The Crash.”
Without the vision of those
who were willing to take a chance on continuing a football program in the wake
of a disaster, Marshall would have
never become the NCAA’s winningest football program in the 1990s.
The scars of the accident still remain
in the minds of those who were on the scene more than four decades ago. A historical
road marker located near Tri-State Airport
serves as a tribute in remembrance of the 75 crash victims. The flames of the
horrible crash from so long ago have died out. Yet, the flame of Thundering
Herd football will continue to burn for years to come.
Chad Pennington photo/ courtesy of The Bleacher Report
Randy Moss photo/courtesy of College Sports Kings.com
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