It has been a tough week to be a Herd fan on the heels of “The Old Brian Anderson,” and “The Old Mark Snyder” showing up in Orlando, Fla. on Sunday evening. But with Marshall on a bye week following the tough loss to UCF, there is some good news in Herdville.
Miami of Ohio (known as, “Little Miami,” from here on) is back on the schedule, starting in 2013 at Edwards Stadium. For those of you on campus not familiar with the rivalry with Little Miami, it’s one that gets the blood boiling for most old school Herd fans.
Certainly most people on campus are familiar with the famous football win over Xavier in 1971, especially after the game was portrayed as the final sequence of that one movie.
Some might not be familiar with, however, is what happened the next week. The Young Thundering Herd played Little Miami – the end result being a 66-6 drubbing in which it is widely speculated Little Miami ran up the score on the hard-luck Herd.
Needless to say, this has not gone over very well in green-bleeding circles. In fact, it possibly has gotten worse over time. During Marshall’s most recent stint in the Mid-American Conference, Little Miami was always trying to be a thorn in the then-mighty Herd’s side, all the while crying because Marshall was dominating the conference.
No game, to me at least, signifies the rivalry with Little Miami more than the 2002 contest in Huntington. Byron Leftwich was out of the game with an injury, and Stan Hill was called upon to take on a pretty good Little Miami team led by my least favorite RedHawk ever, Ben Roethlisberger.
All Hill did was lead the team down the field for the game winning touchdown – a touchdown he ran in himself in one of the most dramatic Edwards Stadium moments in the building’s slightly less-than two decades of service. The mayhem following Hill’s historic scramble was one of the last times Herd students have had the pleasure of storming the field.
It wasn’t just students on the field after that game though. One Marshall fan was assaulted by a Little Miami assistant coach, and some of the other mature Little Miami assistants took it upon themselves to trash their coaches box.
To my generation of Herd fans, it was that definitive, “I freakin’ HATE those guys,” game, and that’s why this deal with Little Miami is such a good thing. Conference USA is great, but what it lacks, as far as Marshall is concerned, is an abundance of natural rivals.
Athletic director Mike Hamrick has done a great job in the short time he has been here to try and restore some of those old rivalries in an attempt to put some electricity in to a suddenly flat fan base. This series, along with the Louisville deal and the pending series with Ohio University (credit where credit is due here – Bob Marcum made that one happen) gives Herd fans the opportunity to actually go to away games.
Going to the away games is always fun, but the home games are what is important here. Ohio U., Louisville and Little Miami are teams that can put butts in seats. Should attendance be high at those games, it would be a great way to say to a certain school in Morgantown, “Hey, we don’t have to have blew and yeller in the stands to fill up our stadium,” without having to actually say a word.
I know it always comes back to that school for me, but considering the current state of negotiations for a Coal Bowl series extension, I think it’s worth mentioning.
Tom Bragg can be contacted at bragg41@marshall.edu.
2 comments
Seriously, no school brings it out like Miami for long-time Herd fans. The little Miami team beat the Herd so many times between 1940 and 1976, the Herald-Dispatch had to run the score to the AP three times because they couldn't believe Marshall had whipped the No. 20-ranked 'Skins (by the way, changing the name from Redskins to RedHawks may be politically correct, but they left the big Chief Miami logo on the press box!) by the score of 21-16, and the final score came on a fumble return by a lineman through another crowd of Herd students descending onto the Fairfield Stadium turf. Every bottle, keg and can of beer at Boney's Hole-in-the-Wall was consumed that evening into the night.