Charles Huff’s Saban-Esque Mentality Has Marshall Ready for More

Coming off one of the program’s biggest wins, its coach doesn’t want to spend much time looking backward.

Aaron Perkins has a green-and-black wedding ring that hints at the depth of his allegiance to Marshall University. His three children all have middle names tied to the school. He hasn’t missed a home football game since the mid-1990s and goes to most of the road games as well.

“I always assumed I knew what the word ‘surreal’ meant, and what it felt like,” says Perkins, a mortgage loan officer in town. “I realized Saturday that I had no idea. I know now. I experienced it.”

Saturday was Marshall 26, Notre Dame 21. Playing at Notre Dame Stadium was a once-in-program-history opportunity for the school. Actually winning is the kind of thing fans of the underdog talk about for the rest of their lives.

Hundreds of them showed up at the airport to greet the arrival of the team plane Saturday night, and more were gathered on campus to welcome the team buses. Media attendance was up at the weekly Tuesday football press conference. National radio and TV interview requests have been pouring in. So did 40 boxes of Cheez-Its, which were delivered to the athletic department offices Monday to congratulate Marshall on being chosen a Cheez-It Bowl Team of the Week.

Local dentist Jim Butler was a Marshall student and was in the stadium when the “Young Herd” team of 1971 defeated Xavier 15–13, as the program rebuilt from the plane crash that killed 75 people—including most of the football team—the year before. That triumph was the stuff of books and movies, including the film, We Are Marshall. He also was in Notre Dame Stadium on Saturday.

“To me, the Xavier game is No. 1 and will always be No. 1,” Butler says. “This could be No. 2, if the rest of the year turns out great.”

They’re still reveling here in Huntington, W.Va., in this narrow strip of flat land tucked between the Appalachian Mountains and the Ohio River. Still walking on air. The bond is tight between town and team, and has been since that awful day in 1970. This was the best football moment in half a century, and they’re not letting go of it anytime soon.

But step into coach Charles Huff’s office and the hoopla ends at the doorway. A styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand, Huff sits down behind his desk and lays a notebook in front of him. The handwriting on it pertains to his primary focus of the day and the week: Bowling Green, the next opponent on the schedule.

Huff is simultaneously aware and wary of the community buzz. To Butler’s point, his job is to make sure the rest of the year turns out great.

“Fans live and die by the week, by the moment,” Huff says. “But we didn’t start the season with the goal of just beating Notre Dame. Focusing on how we won, and not who we beat, will allow us to prepare for this week and the next week and the next week.”

Huff is 39 years old and in his second season as a head coach at any level. He’s been in charge for just 15 games. But his resolve to push forward past that landmark win is the mindset of a veteran head coach—a Nick Saban mindset, you could say.

Huff came to Marshall after spending two seasons under Saban at Alabama—“a two-year doctoral program,” he calls it. He copied and pasted as much of the program as possible and brought it with him to Huntington. He talks like Saban (“the process” comes up often) and even dresses like him (same style hat and vest on the practice field). Of all the Saban assistants now leading their own programs, he might be most like his former boss.

“I’m probably 90% of everything we did at Alabama,” Huff says. “We’re a little different in terms of personality. We beat Kentucky by 60 [in 2020], and in practice the next week you would have thought we lost by 10. But I understood what he’s doing. I can’t be that extreme, but I can also get [the Marshall players] to understand: we beat Notre Dame by five, we should have won by 11. We left some things on the field.”

The man who would be Saban indulged himself with a cigar when he got home Saturday night and a Waffle House breakfast Sunday morning. He returned all of the 350 text messages that had accumulated shortly after the final gun at Notre Dame. Then it was back to the office and back to the grind—Saban, after all, had a staff meeting at Alabama the day after winning the national championship in 2021.

One victory—even over Notre Dame—does not make a season or a coaching career. There is more work to be done.

At 5:55 p.m. Saturday, when quarterback Henry Colombi took a knee and ended the upset of Notre Dame, the Thundering Herd athletic department sprang into action to seize the seismic moment. One school’s football disaster is another school’s financial windfall, and this was a triumph worth savoring—and marketing.

On the field, a staffer darted in to secure the game ball for posterity and profit (it will be a gold mine of an auction item). Marshall requested and received as many unsold game programs as Notre Dame would part with, also to be auctioned off. The athletic department secured the rights to a game poster that was available in South Bend, which it will update with the final score and sell for $75 a pop. A “donate the score” initiative is underway with three giving levels—$26.21, $262.10 and $2,621—and had already brought in more than $10,000 as of Tuesday afternoon. And if Herd fans want to celebrate with their finest meats and cheeses, a wooden charcuterie board emblazoned with the score and school logos will be available soon.

“We’ve had a lot of fun with it,” athletic director Christian Spears says. “We’re trying to take advantage of the moment and have the fans enjoy it at a meet-you-where-you’re-at price point.”

Outside the revenue fountains of the Power 5 conferences, at a place like Marshall in a league like the Sun Belt, every dollar matters. If donors are galvanized by upsetting the Fighting Irish, maybe it leads to having the money to pay for additional support staff. Maybe the recruiting budget gets a boost. Maybe it leads to a facility upgrade.

After winning a couple of FCS national championships in the 1990s, Marshall has found ways to succeed at the FBS level. It has had enough going for it to field a competitive team on an annual basis, with a few historic breakthroughs. And it has had a way of succeeding whoever the coach is—six of the last seven won at least 60% of their games.

In the current era, Huff incorporates as much Saban as possible into a program that lacks Alabama’s resources. The office spaces are small—the defensive meeting room has enough chairs for seven staffers, and full staff meetings pack 32 people in a room that couldn’t adequately hold 33. Despite working at Alabama and for James Franklin at Penn State, Huff is comfortable in an environment that is far more functional than opulent.

“We’re very blue collar,” says his wife, Jessica, a heptathlete at Penn State who has worked as a basketball coach on the college and high school levels. “There’s not a lot of frills with us, and that’s what Huntington is. West Virginia is this beautiful state that people pass through or go around. It’s been great getting to know the place and the bones of this city.”

Charles Huff earned his way up through the sport. He was a walk-on at the FCS level, playing four positions at Hampton—fullback, tight end, offensive guard and center. He was never a big deal as a player.

“When you’re not a good player but a good kid, they keep trying to give you opportunities,” Huff says. “I was too small to play O-line but too slow to play running back. I was smart enough that they wanted to keep me around to tell the good players what to do. Center is the last position on the football team, and that was my last position. At that point, it’s either center or manager. I hung on to the last seat on the bus.

“I played the game for the team camaraderie, to compete with friends and brothers. I enjoyed the schematic chess match. I didn’t play to one day be in the league. I learned some leadership skills, how to get a message across without being the guy who says too much after only playing two plays on the goal line.”

Coaching was the automatic next step after his playing days ended. Really, it was the plan all along. Growing up in Maryland, Huff says that at age 5 he declared his intention to become the first Black coach to win a national championship.

That led him to another HBCU, Tennessee State, after graduation. After three seasons there, he embarked on a fairly typical, five-jobs-in-five-years assistant odyssey before settling in for four years at Penn State with Franklin. Huff followed fellow Franklin offensive staffer Joe Moorhead for a season to Mississippi State, then was hired by Saban as running backs coach and associate head coach.

His recruiting prowess, already established, took a leap upward while with the Crimson Tide. After Alabama won the national championship in January 2021 and the Marshall job opened somewhat unexpectedly a few days earlier, the opportunity to become a head coach presented itself.

Huff didn’t have any natural ties to the school and his name wasn’t well known, but members of the Marshall search committee were impressed by a 45-minute YouTube video they saw of him. The school did Zoom interviews with six candidates, then brought three to campus, and by that time Huff had established himself as the top choice. In Tuscaloosa, Saban’s wife, Terry, told Jessica Huff, “You’re the right people for the right place at the right time.”

Season 1 had its hiccups. With veteran quarterback Grant Wells and a solid returning nucleus, Marshall was favored in 11 out of 12 regular-season games but won only seven, then lost the bowl game to Louisiana. After that, the transfer portal swung both ways.

Wells left for Virginia Tech. Huff brought in several Power 5 transfers who had been around the block, most notably Colombi (Utah State and Texas Tech previously) and running back Khalan Laborn, a former bluechip recruit at Florida State. He went to work building depth on the defensive line. When this season began, Huff was cautiously optimistic that he had a much better team than in Year 1.

After an opening rout of Norfolk State, the year-over-year improvement was on display at Notre Dame. While the result was a shock, it wasn’t a fluke—the Herd outgained the Irish and led for more than half the game.

After falling behind 15–12 in the fourth quarter, Marshall began what will be remembered as one of the most famous drives in school history on its own 6-yard line. Colombi and Laborn combined to run or pass for 88 of the 94 yards on the go-ahead touchdown drive, converting a pair of third downs along the way. After playing in the Big 12 and ACC, neither player walked into Notre Dame Stadium feeling like the moment was too big.

“We believed,” says Colombi, who completed 16 of 21 passes for 145 yards, a touchdown and no interceptions against the Irish.

“That was the domain I was used to,” says Laborn. “I felt comfortable in that environment.”

For Laborn, the journey to Marshall was less believable than what has happened since arriving. He hadn’t played in a Division I game since 2019, having been dismissed for a violation of team rules at Florida State in ’20. Laborn drove all the way to Garden City Community College in Kansas to enroll there, but then figured out he would be better off finishing his degree at FSU and becoming a graduate transfer. So he went back to Tallahassee.

As a nonscholarship student, Laborn paid tuition by working as a driver for Uber, Lyft and Instacart, then at a lumber yard. “I felt like I let a lot of folks down [being dismissed from the team],” Laborn says. “I didn’t want to be remembered that way. It wasn’t sunshine and rainbows at all, but I had to find a way. Getting the grades kept me motivated.”

When Laborn found out he passed the classes he needed to graduate and be immediately eligible as a transfer, he couldn’t wait to call Huff and tell him he’d be at Marshall in January. When star running back Rasheen Ali took a leave of absence for undisclosed reasons in late August, that provided an opportunity for Laborn.

He seized it at Notre Dame, rushing for 161 yards on 31 carries and powering the offense late in the game. (“In the fourth quarter, we scrapped every run in the playbook except inside zone,” Huff says. “We just kept calling it.”) Nearly three years removed from his last Division I playing time, Laborn now has consecutive 100-yard games for the Herd. On a team full of new faces, he’s been one of the most welcome additions.

“The sky’s the limit for this team, I feel,” Laborn says. “This is one of the best teams I’ve ever been a part of.”

Charles Huff walks into the defensive staff meeting Tuesday morning and takes a seat against the wall. He introduces a reporter to the room, saying, “He’s here to write about the Herd defense throwing shutouts the rest of the season.” Everyone laughs, then heads swivel back to the whiteboard for coordinator Lance Guidry’s ongoing breakdown of Bowling Green formations and corresponding Marshall defensive calls.

As with every week, the staff has identified some areas they hope to exploit and also some areas of concern. Huff offers his input on what he saw watching film of the Falcons, focusing on a couple of players and some passing routes that merit special attention. Tuesday is a heavy gameplan day, with the goal to have the players absorbing the specifics without being overwhelmed. “We don’t want Tuesday to be confusing,” Huff says. “Tuesday is a mental challenge. When their minds slow down, their feet slow down.”

An hour later, Huff gathers the full staff in the large meeting room. After the trainer went through the injury report, the head coach’s first item of business was recruiting. With Scott Frost being fired at Nebraska, Huff told his staff to be cognizant of who that might free up among the high school ranks and also potential transfers. With the team traveling to northeast Ohio on Friday for the Bowling Green game, he wants his staff to be out at high school games in the area.

“Even if there aren’t specific players in the area we’re on, let’s get out to some of the schools there,” he says. “Let’s continue to use the momentum [of beating Notre Dame]. Let’s keep our list of names fresh.”

Then Huff goes through the practice plan for the day, with an emphasis on energy and tempo. “Yesterday was pretty good,” he says. “Hopefully we bring the juice today. They’re drinking the Kool-Aid right now; keep it sweet.”

A short while later, Huff holds his weekly press conference. It runs more than 30 minutes, until every question has been asked and answered (that duration and indulgence is a departure from the Saban Way). While the media is understandably looking backward at the Notre Dame victory, Huff and his team are steering the conversation forward.

“We didn’t win a championship Saturday,” says linebacker Eli Neal. “We didn’t get a ring. We didn’t even get in the top 25.”

For lifelong fans like Aaron Perkins and Jim Butler, beating Notre Dame is a moment that will last forever. For Charles Huff and the Marshall players, it was a giddy Saturday that only escalates the importance of what’s ahead. Improbable victories are part of the process—to use a Sabanism—of building a champion. They don’t mark a culmination as much as a launching point.

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