Athletics
Marshall's sports teams are known as the Thundering Herd. The school colors are kelly green and white. Marshall participates in NCAA Division I (FBS for football) as a member of Conference USA. The name Thundering Herd came from a Zane Gray novel released in 1925, and a silent movie of the same two years later. Marshall teams were originally known as the Indians, and the green-white colors came in 1903, replacing black and blue. The Herald-Dispatch sports editor Carl "Duke" Ridgley tagged the team with the Thundering Herd name, but many other nicknames were suggested over the next thirty years, including Boogercats, Big Green, Green Gobblers, Rams, Judges and others. In 1965, students, alums and faculty settled on Thundering Herd in a vote, and Big Green was given to the athletic department's fund-raising wing.
Sports at the school include women's softball, swimming & diving, tennis, volleyball, and track & field; men's football, baseball; and teams for both genders in basketball cross country, golf, and soccer. Marshall also fields club teams, not affiliated with the MU Athletic Department, in rugby union for both women and men, and a men's lacrosse team.
From 1964 to 1983, Marshall's football program suffered a dismal streak of losing seasons and was suspended by the Mid-American Conference in 1969 for 144 alleged recruiting violations in 1968–69 in football and basketball. While the NCAA issued a one-year probation, the MAC would not take the program back as late as 1972. This was exacerbated by the 1970 plane crash that killed nearly all of the team's coaches and players. Marshall had the worst record of any major college playing football in the 1970s, winning only 23 games and losing 83 over that ten-year period. Marshall joined the Southern Conference for all sports in 1977, but football was 0–26–1 in the first five years. MU's only non-loss came on a 59-yard field goal with no time left by freshman Barry Childers at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, N.C., for a 13–13 tie. In 1981, Marshall won its first SC game by beating Appalachian State in Boone, N.C., 17–14, and the celebration included a 30-mile police escort and a crowd estimated at 3,000 met the team when they unloaded at Gullickson Hall on the MU campus.
Beginning in 1984, Marshall football experienced a remarkable turnaround as Stan Parrish's first team nailed down a 6–5 mark with a 31–28 win at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tenn., inside the Memorial Center or "Mini-Dome," the Buccaneers 12,000-seat indoor football facility. The Thundering Herd posted 21 straight winning seasons, winning the SC in 1988, 1994 and 1996, before going 4–7 in 2005 under first-year head coach Mark Snyder, a former Herd All-American defensive back and native of nearby South Point, Ohio, who played for the Herd in 1987 after leading the Ironton (Ohio) Tigers to the state championship game as a quarterback.
Despite past conference titles and five appearances in the NCAA Tournament, men's basketball at the university was in a state of mediocrity since advancing to the NIT in 1988. Marshall finished as runner-up in its final Southern Conference tournament in 1997, losing on a last second shot by UT-Chattanooga, and made one trip to the Mid-American Conference semi-finals in 2000 before falling to Miami, Ohio. Recently, however, the basketball team has found success since the 2007 hiring of Donnie Jones. Jones led the Herd to the postseason in 2010 in the CollegeInsider.com tournament. Jones left for UCF in the offseason, and Tom Herrion took charge of the team, and in 2011 landed in the College Basketball Invitational.
Marshall's biggest rivalries out of conference are with Ohio University, Miami University and West Virginia University, while East Carolina University and University of Central Florida have been the biggest rivals in Conference USA so far. Tulane University and the Herd baseball team now seem to be bitter rivals as MU was 3–1–1 against the Green Wave in 2008, winning its first game ever back in April in New Orleans. Marshall returned to the "Big Easy" in May and knocked Tulane out of the C-USA Tournament on the Green Wave home field, Turchin Stadium, in the C-USA Tournament, 10–5 and 8–7. Yeager stole a league-record five bases against TU in the opening win, while Jeff Rowley scored the winning run in game two on a wild pitch in the bottom of the ninth.
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