OPINION: Holliday’s time at Marshall was good but not good enough

COMMENTARY

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. – Doc Holliday’s 85 wins, six bowl victories, three conference championship game appearances and one league title in 11 years were not good enough to retain him as Marshall’s head football coach.

Good but not good enough encapsulates the feelings of many fans about Holliday’s decade-plus leading Marshall’s football program.

Holliday announced on Twitter on Monday that he had been informed by Marshall University President Jerome Gilbert that his contract was not being extended and his time at Marshall had come to an end.

The news that Holliday was being forced out as the Herd’s head coach came just two weeks after he had been named Conference USA’s Coach of the Year for a second time.

Go back to 2010 and Marshall was coming off a seven-year stretch in which it posted just two winning seasons and a single bowl victory. Holliday began to build the roster from the ground up and went 5-7 in his first season. The program started to take off in 2011 defeating FIU 20-10 in the Beef ‘O Brady’s Bowl, kicking off a streak of six consecutive bowl victories.

Holliday’s 2014 team posted a 13-1 record, scored Marshall’s first C-USA Championship and finished the season ranked 23rd in the Associate Press Poll. Holliday also earned his first Conference USA Coach of the Year award that season. He’s the only coach in the league to have won the award twice.

His 85 wins rank second all-time at Marshall, just nine victories shy of Bob Pruett’s record of 94. The Thundering Herd earned 43 All-C-USA first team selections, 28 second-teamers, 44 honorable mention picks and 26 All-Freshman team selections during Holliday’s 11 seasons. He had 13 players selected for C-USA’s top individual player-of-the-year awards.

By all accounts Holliday ran a clean program, dealt with issues swiftly, and graduated players.

However, with all the success there was a lingering feeling that Marshall could have achieved more.

One of the knock’s on Holliday’s teams was an inability to “win the big one.” Under Holliday, Marshall was just 1-8 against teams ranked in the Top 25, with that lone win coming this season against 17th ranked Appalachian State. His record against teams in “Power 5” conferences was not much better. Marshall was 2-10 in games against P5 schools, defeating Purdue 41-31 in 2015 and knocking off Maryland 31-20 in the 2013 Military Bowl.

There are other losses that were hard to stomach over Holliday’s tenure, including the shootout loss to Western Kentucky in 2014 that spoiled a perfect season, an inexplicable defeat at Charlotte in 2019 that cost the Herd a shot at the C-USA title and the implosion over the course of the final three games of this season.

Holliday’s time at Marshall was good. He embraced the community and the culture, telling Marshall’s story to anyone who would listen.

He brought the program out of the doldrums it had slipped into following Bob Pruett’s sudden retirement in the spring of 2005. He help shape the lives of the young men who played for him leaving a last impact that went far beyond the football field.

His players, staff and other coaches around the country respected him.

But in the end, all the achievements, the accolades and the admiration of former players weren’t good enough to keep his job.





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