Oh Yeah? Well Marshall’s the Best Program in College Football.

The thing nobody is acknowledging, in the wake of Notre Dame’s valiant attempt to take down the Marshall University Thundering Herd, is that Marshall is the greatest college football program over the nation over the last 52 years. Hear me out.

1970 was still, to an extent, a prehistoric time in college sports. When Marshall’s plane went down, the NCAA only had two divisions: There was the University Division, and there was the College Division. It wasn’t until 1973 that the organization adopted the D-I/D-II/D-III split with which we’re familiar today, and it wasn’t until 1978 that Division I split into I-A and I-AA, now known as the FBS and the FCS. Marshall’s plane went down at the beginning of a dramatic transitional period for collegiate athletics. After 1973, athletic departments and entire conferences moved rapidly between classifications, trying to figure out where they fit. Many football programs didn’t survive this transition. Many haven’t survived the decades since. Those which have risen through the ranks—Boise State, Coastal Carolina, North Dakota State, others—have mainly come from schools serving areas of rapid population growth, schools with inherent demographic advantages allowing them to thrive at the I-AA/FCS level, and then often in the mid-major ranks after a I-A/FBS transition. At the same time, though, Marshall has also risen. Marshall has risen dramatically.

Marshall was not a good football team when the plane went down. In 1967 and 1968, they tied once, lost nineteen times, and failed to win at all. They had just two winning seasons in the entire 1960s, and two in the 50s, and a little more success in the 40s but only one bowl appearance, a 1947 Tangerine Bowl shutout at the hands of Catawba College, now a D-II school (…athletic departments and entire conferences moved rapidly between classifications, trying to figure out where they fit…). Shutting the program down would have been a reasonable response. There was no reason to believe any fruit could come of the Marshall football program.

After the crash, there was the rebuild. There was the team of almost entirely freshmen. There was the dramatic victory over Xavier. There were other flashes of hope and comfort. But it wasn’t until 1984, fourteen seasons and four head coaches after the tragedy, that Marshall posted a winning record. By that point, they were a I-AA team, having surrendered with the rest of the Southern Conference and abandoned college football’s top division. They won six games, lost five, and this constituted their best year since 1965. Two years later, their head coach left for Kansas State, leaving behind no reason for Marshall to be anything but a small public school on the banks of the Ohio River, the second-largest state institution in a state big enough to heartily support only one university.

That’s when the story got good.

There was a guy named George Chaump, and there’s a guy named Jim Donnan, and there’s a guy named Bob Pruett, and I don’t know how they did it but this string of three coaches took Marshall University football and over a combined nineteen years at the helm saw the program become something of a powerhouse. From 1986 through 2004, the Thundering Herd didn’t turn in a single losing campaign. Throughout the 1990s, no Division I football team won more games than Marshall. They made the 1987 I-AA National Championship, and then did it five more times from 1991 through 1996, winning it twice. From a capital of coal country, from the city which would go on to be named the epicenter of the opioid crisis, from a place out of which little rises, Marshall rose. In 1997, they played their first I-A season in a decade and a half, and they didn’t miss a beat, winning ten games. In 1999, they went undefeated, trouncing BYU in a bowl game. Randy Moss was the 21^st pick of the 1998 NFL Draft. Chad Pennington was the 18^th pick of the 2000 NFL Draft. Byron Leftwich was the 7^th pick of the 2003 NFL Draft. The coaches came and went—only Pruett retired at Marshall, and he later came out of retirement for a year to coach the defense at the University of Virginia—but the program kept winning. And with the wins, the program kept rising.

American sports are notoriously socialistic, which makes it hard for a team to rise from rags to riches. Individual athletes do it all the time, but teams don’t. They can’t. Major League Baseball and the NFL and the NBA and the NHL all subsidize franchises which fail to perform, both financially and on the field of play. There is expansion in these leagues, but there’s no upward mobility. In college, upward mobility exists, but it’s usually confined to schools with some sort of significant sociological tailwind. Texas isn’t joining the SEC right now because of excellent performance on the gridiron, Saturday’s result notwithstanding. Texas is joining the SEC right now because Texas is a successful economic brand. Historic performance plays a major role in that, but it’s not as simple as winning and rising. Marshall, of course, is the exception. There is no reason for a small public school in Huntington, West Virginia to be college football’s embodiment of the American Dream, and yet it is, which in turn makes it embody the Dream all the more. Marshall had its donors, and it had support from the state of West Virginia (the program’s turnaround came amidst the construction of a new, publicly funded stadium), but this is not Liberty University athletics, a banner program for a powerful demographic, and it is not North Dakota State or Boise State football, each blessed by populaces growing faster than nearly any others in the nation. This is a small public school in Huntington, West Virginia. It kept winning. And so it rose. And now, perhaps, it’s beginning to win again.

Notre Dame people should appreciate Marshall’s rise. Notre Dame was an underdog once itself. Back in the days of Knute Rockne, there was no reason for a small Catholic school to compete against the national powers of the day, especially once that loser Ned Yost started refusing to play the scrappy Irish kids down across the state line, even trying to convince his Western Conference colleagues to do the same. This isn’t to say we should like what happened on Saturday—that was the worst thing we’ve institutionally done in front of Touchdown Jesus’s watchful eyes since we made him watch the 2016 season (I thought I was going to get to make a Brian Kelly math joke from the 2014 Northwestern game, but then I was reminded 2016 somehow happened). But, we should be able to appreciate it more than most. Most of college football’s fat cats have always been overweight. We crossed that BMI threshold more recently.

So, congratulations to Marshall, the unlikely program who improbably learned how to win all the damn time. Hopefully they do that again this year. Because losing to a 12-0 mid-major feels better than losing to the joke of a UNC team that will probably beat us in two weeks.