Aaron Perkins has a green-and-black wedding ring that hints at the depth of his allegiance to Marshall University. His three children all have middle names tied to the school. He hasn’t missed a home football game since the mid-1990s and goes to most of the road games as well.
“I always assumed I knew what the word ‘surreal’ meant, and what it felt like,” says Perkins, a mortgage loan officer in town. “I realized Saturday that I had no idea. I know now. I experienced it.”
Saturday was Marshall 26, Notre Dame 21. Playing at Notre Dame Stadium was a once-in-program-history opportunity for the school. Actually winning is the kind of thing fans of the underdog talk about for the rest of their lives.
Hundreds of them showed up at the airport to greet the arrival of the team plane Saturday night, and more were gathered on campus to welcome the team buses. Media attendance was up at the weekly Tuesday football press conference. National radio and TV interview requests have been pouring in. So did 40 boxes of Cheez-Its, which were delivered to the athletic department offices Monday to congratulate Marshall on being chosen a Cheez-It Bowl Team of the Week.
Local dentist Jim Butler was a Marshall student and was in the stadium when the “Young Herd” team of 1971 defeated Xavier 15–13, as the program rebuilt from the plane crash that killed 75 people—including most of the football team—the year before. That triumph was the stuff of books and movies, including the film, . He also was in Notre Dame Stadium on Saturday.
“To me, the Xavier game is No. 1 and will always be No. 1,” Butler says. “This could be No. 2, if the rest of the year turns out great.”
They’re still reveling here in Huntington, W.Va., in this narrow strip of flat land tucked between the Appalachian Mountains and the Ohio River. Still walking on air. The bond is tight between town and team, and has been since that awful day in 1970. This was the best football moment in half a century, and they’re not letting go of it anytime soon.
But step into coach Charles Huff’s office and the hoopla ends at the doorway. A styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand, Huff sits down behind his desk and lays a notebook in front of him. The handwriting on it pertains to his primary focus of the day and the week: Bowling Green, the next opponent on the schedule.
Huff is simultaneously aware and wary of the community buzz. To Butler’s point, his job is to make sure the rest of the year turns out great.
“Fans live and die by the week, by the moment,” Huff says. “But we didn’t start the season with the goal of just beating Notre Dame. Focusing on how we won, and not who we beat, will allow us to prepare for this week and the next week and the next week.”
Huff is 39 years old and in his second season as a head coach at any level. He’s been in charge for just 15 games. But his resolve to push forward past that landmark win is the mindset of a veteran head coach—a Nick Saban mindset, you could say.
Huff came to Marshall after spending two seasons under Saban at Alabama—“a two-year doctoral program,” he calls it. He copied and pasted as much of the program as possible and brought it with him to Huntington. He talks like Saban (“the process” comes up often) and even dresses like him (same style hat and vest on the practice field). Of all the Saban assistants now leading their own programs, he might be most like his former boss.
“I’m probably 90% of everything we did at Alabama,” Huff says. “We’re a little different in terms of personality. We beat Kentucky by 60 [in 2020], and in practice the next week you would have thought we lost by 10. But I understood what he’s doing. I can’t be that extreme, but I can also get [the Marshall players] to understand: we beat Notre Dame by five, we should have won by 11. We left some things on the field.”
The man who would be Saban indulged himself with a cigar when he got home Saturday night and a Waffle House breakfast Sunday morning. He returned all of the 350 text messages that had accumulated shortly after the final gun at Notre Dame. Then it was back to the office and back to the grind—Saban, after all, had a staff meeting at Alabama the day after winning the national championship in 2021.
One victory—even over Notre Dame—does not make a season or a coaching career. There is more work to be done.
