Marshall might be playing UConn in the Myrtle Beach Bowl, but the Thundering Herd do not hail from Coastal Carolina’s neck of the woods in the slightest.
Randy Moss, Chad Pennington, Byron Leftwich and Matthew McConaughey are probably why you are familiar with the Marshall football program (alright, alright, alright), but do you even have a remote clue as to where the public research university is located in this fine country of ours?
Well, we do know that their mascot is the Thundering Herd, best and most appropriately symbolized by a bison. Does this mean the university is somewhere between Oklahoma City and the Dakotas, MegaKota for short? Well, what if I told you it was in fact closer to Rand, West Virginia than it was to Austin, Texas? This might come as quite the shock, but they are Marshall!
Marshall University is located in Huntington, West Virginia in the tri-state area known as Kyova.
Marshall University is where it’s at in the Kyova region of the United States
Huntington, West Virginia sits at the mouth of the Guyandotte River where it meets the Ohio River. The Huntington-Ashland metropolitan area encapsulates the region in which Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia meet. Situationally located, you are looking at a metropolitan area that has around 350,000 people. Some 12,000 students are enrolled in the city’s major college campus.
Although West Virginia University gets most of the glitz and glamor in-state so to speak, West Virginia has two major public universities: WVU in Morgantown and Marshall over in Huntington. Marshall University was founded in 1837 as the Marshall Academy. The institution was named after former United States Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, who was from … Virginia.
Though it is a proud academic institution, most people know of the university because of its football program. Although the plane crash in 1970 was massively devastating and was later made into a movie, the Thundering Herd had their best run of success under Jim Donnan and then immediately after with Bob Pruett, who coached Moss, Pennington and Leftwich, among others.
While you know UConn is not from The Yukon, you now know where the Thundering Herd roam.
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