Runnin' with the Herd: FootballScoop Goes All-Access With Charles Huff, Marshall Football

HUNTINGTON, W. Va. – Scratch a tent revival; Charles Huff was hosting a tent removal.

In the process, Marshall’s new football coach had initiated a foundation installation.

On the job barely four months and on the cusp of overseeing a summer conditioning program for the first time ever as a head coach, Huff received a call from Ben Ashford in late May 2021.

“I learned a lot about Charles Huff in this moment,” said Ashford, Marshall’s assistant athletic director and head of sports performance, the man Huff hired away from Samford into arguably any football program's most important non-head coaching role. “Because it’s the tail end of COVID-19 protocol, and we had some commencement ceremonies on our field in the month of May.

“We’re about to start our first summer day, summer runs with the whole team, it’s Memorial Day weekend, and all these tents still are set up on the field. Big circus tents, a huge stage, concert-style circus tents.”

The opening of summer sprints amidst a new dawn of Marshall football was not going to be a clown show; of this, Huff was adamant.

“He said you and your guys take the tents down,” said Ashford, with an undergraduate degree from Auburn and a master’s from Alabama. “We started and I realized this is a monumental task. The stage was interlaced, this circus tent was about 30 feet.”

When an obstacle arose, Huff was prepared to arrive with an answer.

“He said, ‘Get me a hammer, a sledgehammer, and I’ll take it down myself,’” Ashford recalled. “And before I knew it, he was on the field pulling straps down himself, taking the tent down himself. He climbed up on a 55-gallon drum and started taking down that tent.

“I said, ‘Coach, we don’t want to destroy this company’s stuff,’ and he said, ‘Their stuff is supposed to be off our field. It’s Memorial Day, but we’re in our office. Where are they?’ From that moment on, I have yet to tell him no. We’ll find a way. And he carries himself that way to this very day.”

More importantly, the more people Huff touches around the Thundering Herd football program, the more they carry themselves in that same way.

A program that stretches every resource, two-spots every drill for maximum repetitions, has not lent itself under Huff to any element of inauthenticity. An opportunity has arisen, and Huff, with every fiber of his East Maryland-roots, Tidewater-playing days affixed himself and his program to seize this moment.

“I don’t know if we’ve changed the perception, but I do think the brand and the foundation here was good. Probably what we’ve done is that we’ve probably become more visible nationally,” Huff, winner of 16 games in his first two season as head coach, including an upset at then-No. 8 Notre Dame, told FootballScoop from his office overlooking the Herd’s Edwards Stadium. “And you can think back for 10, 20 years; Marshall has been a solid program. They may not have won a (conference) championship every year, but they have been solid. And that doesn’t have anything to do with me.

“I think now we’re entering, we’re not there yet, we’re entering into the consistently relevant world; App State, UCF, Cincinnati. We’re getting into that world. And I think we’re on the front end of it. Meaning have been known to have good programs, but are now recently making a lot of noise. I think we’re entering into that realm. I think that Troy is probably doing that. And I think that allows you to run at a faster pace. One, it affects your community involvement now when you’re talking NIL. It’s an easier conversation than if you were just willowing in, and I don’t know anything about them, but if we were Southern Miss. It’s probably really hard to generate the energy and momentum in NIL, and I know that Will (Hall) has improved it from where it has been.”

A former walk-on collegiate football player at Hampton who played three different offensive line positions and fullback, Huff assessed college football’s present landscape, where the sport could be going and how specifically his program can be Marshall’s vehicle for that journey.

“I think the issue is now, OK, now that you are entering into that world, how do you stay there and then how do you move forward?,” Huff asked. “Because I think Cincinnati before they were in the College Football Playoff, they were 10, 9, 10 wins for two to three years in a row. I think we’re on the front end of that. How do we stay there and ultimately get to that level?

“It’s tougher here, just because of location and school size and all of those things, but I do think going through this (NCAA Transfer) Portal stuff now, I do think we’re going to be viable option for a lot of good players because we’re entering into that new-age realm of relevance. Once you get in the door, you’ve got to stay in the building. That’s what we’ve got to do now.”

THE HERD’S PATH

The door is metaphor for Marshall football under Huff.

Open wide. What rests on the other side?

Players hardly knew in winter 2021.

A head coach’s office open to visitors? Nah. Not here at Marshall, tucked in the West Virginia hills with rivers and borders alongside Kentucky and Ohio.

Well, yeah.

“It’s nice. (Offensive lineman Dalton Tucker) and I go in there just randomly, just to shoot it out; see what’s going on,” said super-senior Owen Porter, a homegrown-talent from nearby Spring Valley High School who’s logged 45 career games along the defensive line entering his farewell season. “We never like would have done that three years ago. It’s nice.

“It helps because you want to play for somebody that you like and you respect. So when somebody’s willing to give you their time, and we obviously know how busy Coach Huff is, so it’s not like we’re popping in there every single day, taking up a bunch of time, but we know he’s willing to give up 30 minutes, 45 minutes to any of us. Just to sit in there and talk. That just makes you like a person more. If they’re willing to give up their time for you like that, I’m going to give up my body for him.”

Tucker has broached subjects well beyond the football field. A sixth-year senior and anchor on the Marshall offensive line, Tucker has a wedding date set next month to his college sweetheart, a former Herd cheerleader now in medical school, and tackled auto repairs as well with Huff.

“He’s always going to remember everything and he’s always going to help you out as much as he can; it’s a great feeling,” said Tucker, a 6-foot-6, 325-pound Bourbon County, Ky., native, who most recently visited with his head coach to discuss Tucker’s need to repair his ride’s carburetor. “I feel like the benefits of that are that’s the guy that runs your whole program, and him having an open-door policy just shows that he trusts you and you can trust him. It’s a thing of trusting everybody.”

Huff has not – yet, anyway – sat in the top chair at a Power 5 program. With understudy work under Alabama icon Nick Saban, as well as Minnesota’s PJ Fleck and Penn State’s James Franklin, Huff has molded his coaching persona from all.

But the open-door approach has remained internally non-negotiable; a fabric of the man who has taken his approach of being a lead recruiter with every player to cultivate a healthier environment within the program.

When Josh Moten, the former Texas A&M defensive back and one of the 10 P5 transfers on the Herd’s current roster, hesitated to enter Huff’s office – even at his head coach’s request – then Huff took a step back.

“I texted him about a couple guys and said, ‘Well, come by and see me,’” said Huff, who also logged a season an NFL assistant with the Buffalo Bills. “He was barely peeking his head into the door, and I said, ‘Man, come in the door. What are you doing?’ I said, ‘You couldn’t go into Jimbo (Fisher’s) office?’ He was like, ‘NO! You didn’t go in that office.’

“I think it’s just different and other places are different. I would assume at a higher level, there is probably a lot more that the head coach has to do so maybe it’s not as tangible. I always think about it for myself, OK, God willing you get one of those jobs, I want to still be the area coach, the position coach. I want kids that want to walk by my door and want to poke their head into the door and say hello. I don’t want it to be get a meeting with the secretary and find out what the meeting is about, they want a preemptive to know what the meeting is about so that they’re ready.”

Sharrod Everett is the tip of the spear in the Marshall football offices; among college football’s most distinguished and rising off-the-field assets with stints at P5 programs Florida State, Oregon and Vanderbilt, Everett has known Huff since they were in the formative collegiate careers at Tennessee State in Nashville.

Now an assistant athletics director and Herd football’s chief of staff, Everett has an office tucked at the front end of the narrow corridor to the head coach’s space.

There has not been an administrative assistant to run interference for Huff, and there have been no plans to add such personnel.

What there has been, Everett noted, was a dramatic increase in foot-traffic down that hallway.

“I think that’s helped him for not only the players but the staff as well, administration, everybody comes in here,” Everett said. “He’s an approachable guy; it’s not like going to see the principle who listens only to these guys. You walk in that office at any time, and you don’t go through a secretary or administrative assistant.

“And he will listen. I appreciate that. He will listen, he will love ’em, but he will tell them the truth. One way to build a great culture is you want to be told the truth, too. Sometimes the truth is not what you want to hear. But with Coach Huff, you know you’re going to get the truth, you know you’re to be treated fair. And you know he will shoot you straight.”

HERD ON THE HORIZON

After a 100-play scrimmage in their first spring intrasquad session followed up by a 60-play session designed to better gauge the program’s depth and players who could comprise the critical ‘second-22,’ the Herd wind their way toward the end of spring camp.

They have a new defensive coordinator in Jason Semore, who arrived after a year as Georgia Tech’s special teams coordinator and having been dubbed an FootballScoop Linebacker Coach of the Year finalist; a new tight ends coach in Derek Shay, with experience at two different SEC schools whom one insider dubbed “an absolutely helluva a good football coach;” and special teams coordinator Johnathan Galante, a former Virginia Tech player who shared time with Huff on staff at Alabama.

Offensive coordinator Clint Trickett played under Fisher at Florida State, learned under Lane Kiffin at Florida Atlantic and has begun to settle into a groove in Huntington. The Herd have an elite returning running back in Rasheen Ali, a tantalizing quarterback in Cam Fancher and key experience along the offensive front.

Too, Trickett – who’s already garnered P5 interest around the country -- has begun to implement more of his vision for the offense.

More importantly, he has watched Huff take the best of his past experiences and mold them into Huff’s own vision for a program.

“I’ve done this as a player and done this as a coach. It is the ’Bama system, it is that format. Which you can’t just rep this,” Trickett said. “It’s easy to try to copy and paste and put a different logo on it, but to actually bring the mindset and change the culture, that’s what’s different and that’s what Coach Huff has done a phenomenal job. It’s hard to do that in a lot of places. It was hard to do it at FAU, and we did it for a little bit. Now we’re doing it here now.

“He’s had a lot of success with it in two short years, and this is a place where, as you can see, we’ve done a good job of getting really talented players here and I credit that to Coach Huff. Other than him being an elite communicator, his ability to get talent and develop talent is why we’ve been successful.”

See Group of 5 Marshall, with Huff’s deep-reaching connections and industry-wide reputation as a coach for whom people want to work, has anything but a G5 staff.

It’s perhaps that element above all that has not been lost on the players.

“I think it kind of starts out with specifically, Coach Huff, the way that he acts, kind of holds himself to a lot better standard,” said Porter, who had been wooed by other programs but remained true to his blue-collar, Herd-green roots. “And also the guys that we brought in.

“It was always a joke whenever we first got here that we were kind of like, I don’t know how to put this politely, we were like a lower Division I school. We tended to get kids that were a little rougher around the edges. Now we’ve gotten a lot better moral kids to be around on our team; that helps the culture and the team all around.”

Huff recalled as much, evoking one of America’s great entertainment institutions as he assessed Marshall’s climb from Year 1 to present day.

“It was basically Royal Rumble the first year,” Huff said of the hyperbolic WWE every-man-for-himself brawls. “We had a D-lineman punch an O-lineman in the face. It was just, I don’t like to use the word renegade, but it was Wild, Wild West.

“Now, it is let me fiercely compete my ass off. But I still know you’re my teammate.”

Competition will be most stiff for the Herd in 2023. They open against FCS Albany but then have high-stakes non-conference matchups against East Carolina, Virginia Tech and NC State; the Herd get to welcome in the Hokies Sept. 23 to Edwards Stadium in what is expected to be a frenzied, sold-out affair.

Despite Huff being hired after the first signing period in the ’21 class, Marshall largely has flipped its roster but likewise retained those crucial veterans such as Porter and Tucker, among others. The Herd have players on their roster with previous stops the likes of Florida, Florida State, Texas A&M, Wake Forest, Kentucky, Miami and, yes, even from rival App State – with plug-and-play linebacker KeSean Brown.

The schedule has individual tests and a collective gauntlet; Marshall does not have a week off after Sept. 16.

“We’ve got 10 straight games,” Huff said. “We’ve got bye week Week 3, and then we’ve got 10 straight. We have to stay healthy. I’m not talking guys out sore, but I’m talking catastrophic injuries. I think our recruiting model has been good. We’re not just going out and recruiting good players, we’re recruiting a good team. I think Big B.A. has done a really good job with our guys in strength and conditioning; we’ve got guys developing.

“And the overall culture of everyone trying to improve. Even if I’m a walk-on and way down the depth chart, I’m going to improve. Everyone is trying to improve, and if I’m the last guy on the roster and I’m trying to get better, it makes us all get a little bit better.”

If that sounds like a certain other coach, the King of College Football, well it’s with good reason.

“My dad’s worked for Coach Saban, and I’ve worked for a lot of guys who have been under Coach Saban. Coach Huff’s probably the closest representation to him of all of those guys, with him still being able to be himself and be different,” Trickett said. “To hold the standard of what every day and coming in to work and what the process is, but still also being able to be a relatable coach. Not necessarily a ‘cool’ coach, but one that kids like playing for and want to be around.

“He’ll still at the drop off a hat rip your ass if he needs to, but I love learning from him every single day since I’ve been here.”

Charles Huff? He’ll bring the tents down if needed. All part of developing a program; setting a standard.