The Thundering Herd is the football team of Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. They compete in the Football Bowl Subdivision of the NCAA and play in the Sun Belt Conference.
Marshall claims 13 conference titles, most recently winning the Conference USA Championship in 2014. The Thundering Herd have been led by Coach Charles Huff since 2021, and in 2022 the team joined the Sun Belt Conference, after 17 years as a member of Conference USA.
In 1970, Southern Airlines Flight 932 was carrying the Thundering Herd back from a game in North Carolina when it crashed into a hill, killing all 75 people on board. This included 37 members of the football team and 8 members of the coaching staff. It remains the deadliest tragedy ever suffered by a sports team in the United States, and almost led to the permanent cancellation of the football program at Marshall. The team was due to commemorate the 50 year anniversary of the disaster in August 2020 with a game against East Carolina, the school who defeated the Thundering Herd just before the plane crash, but the fixture was never played due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
