Topic: Gazette: C-USA notebook

[ZackUSAF82]

Herd’s making wrong kind of history this year

By Doug Smock
Staff writer

Marshall is trying this week to impede East Carolina’s run to the East Division title in Conference USA.

Next week, the Thundering Herd may be facing an already-crowned West Division champion in Houston.

And in the season finale Nov. 24, Marshall could be playing a historic game in Joan C. Edwards Stadium, when Alabama-Birmingham comes to town. But it’s not exactly a piece of history that MU officials will immortalize on 2008 billboards and media guides.

Unless the Herd pulls an upset in the next two weeks, it will enter that final game with a 1-10 record. UAB plays Central Florida and Memphis over the next two weeks, and stands to arrive in Huntington 2-9.

That would appear to be the most combined losses entering a Marshall home game, and a check of history suggests there isn’t a close second.

That is partly a function of the 12-game schedule. In Marshall’s worst years of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it played 10-game seasons. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, the slate had gone to 11.

But the Herd’s ill fortunes are the prime culprit. When it takes on East Carolina at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, it will be the fourth time a Marshall team with exactly eight losses has played a home game. One other time, in the 1967 season finale — coincidentally, against ECU — Marshall entered 0-9.

Link: http://wvgazette.com/section/Sports/Marshall/2007110857