Marshall University Athletics
MCGILL: App State brings familiarity, excitement to 2020 schedule
8/17/2020 11:21:00 PM | Football, Word on the Herd
Marshall will host the Mountaineers at Joan C. Edwards Stadium next month
By Chuck McGill
HerdZone.com
HUNTINGTON, W.Va. – The Marshall football program's original 2020 schedule featured, perhaps, its most daunting, impressive non-conference slate in school history. Three of those four games – home contests against the University of Pittsburgh and Boise State, plus a road game against longtime rival Ohio – were wiped out in recent weeks.
The Pitt series was announced in October of 2014. The two-game home-and-home contract with Boise State was signed a year later. Those are home games that had game contracts signed and delivered five and six years in advance. That's not unusual in major college football, but it shows how much advanced planning goes into these scheduling agreements.
Then again, nothing about 2020 has been usual. Nothing in the past few weeks has been usual. But Marshall Director of Athletics Mike Hamrick was there in his Shewey office, day after day, reacting to the twists and turns on a moment's notice. When Pitt bailed, Hamrick adjusted. When Boise State fell off the schedule, he reacted. That's how we arrived to this moment Monday afternoon and some much-needed good news. If a Marshall football fan had a case of the Mondays, hopefully this announcement provided some semblance of relief.
Hamrick could have settled for what would have been, essentially, a Conference USA schedule plus the important matchup at East Carolina, this season being the 50th anniversary of the Marshall football team plane crash on a trip back from Greenville, North Carolina. But Hamrick wanted to replace those home games. He wanted teams to visit Huntington. He wanted to provide the local economy a boost the home game will provide. He wanted to bring an attractive opponent here for a loyal and passionate fan base.
Hamrick knew it'd be a challenge to find another Atlantic Coast Conference team like Pitt, or a Mountain West team that has spent the better part of the last two decades nationally ranked, but he wanted to find teams to come to Joan C. Edwards Stadium.
Mission: Accomplished.
Appalachian State will visit on September 19 – one month from this Wednesday. It's not the northern Mountaineers in Huntington, but it is an opponent that finished last season in the Top 25. App State finished the 2019 season ranked No. 19 in the Associated Press Top 25 poll, four spots higher than Boise State, the non-conference opponent it essentially replaced on Marshall's 2020 schedule. Pitt did not finish the season inside the AP's Top 25.
App State won 13 games a season ago. Three other FBS teams did, too: LSU, Clemson and Ohio State.
That should be convincing enough on the field, but the Mountaineers bring plenty of intrigue off the field, too. Appalachian State's head coach, Shawn Clark, is a West Virginia native who played for the Boone, North Carolina, school. Clark was there from 1994-98, and tangled with the Herd several times as an offensive lineman. Clark took over as head coach for the 2019 New Orleans Bowl against UAB, and will make his regular season debut against Charlotte on September 12. Clark's first road trip as a head coach will, in a twist, be to his home state.
Clark's offensive coordinator will be familiar to Herd fans, too. Tony Petersen, who ranks in the top 10 for career passing yards and career passing touchdowns at Marshall, was hired by Clark to call plays and coach quarterbacks at App State. The Mountaineers' director of athletic performance is Brad Bielaniec, who spent one season as Marshall's head strength coach before leaving for Appalachian State, paving the way for Luke Day's return to Huntington.
Additionally, Clark was a multi-sport star at George Washington High School in Charleston, the same school that produced current MU quarterback Grant Wells.
App State leads the all-time series 14-8, but there will be plenty of opportunities to rectify that this decade. Monday's agreement adds two games in a series that already had a two-game deal in place. After opening at Navy and playing home games versus North Carolina Central and East Carolina, the Herd will head to Appalachian State on September 25, 2021. The Mountaineers will again play in Huntington in 2022, tucked between road trips to Notre Dame and Bowling Green.
Marshall is scheduled to return to Boone on September 8, 2029, completing Monday's announced contract.
Hopefully, future meetings between the two longtime football foes will have a whole lot more of the usual to them than 2020 has brought to college football.
Chuck McGill is the Assistant Athletic Director for Fan/Donor Engagement and Communications at Marshall University and an eight-time winner of the National Sports Media Association West Virginia Sportswriter of the Year award. In addition to HerdZone.com's Word on the Herd, McGill is the editor of Thundering Herd Illustrated, Marshall's official athletics publication. Follow him on Twitter (@chuckmcgill) and Instagram (wordontheherd).
