Marshall Football Coach Charles Huff Gets to Work Putting His Mark on Herd Program

Charles Huff’s plate has been full — both literally and figuratively — since arriving in Huntington as the new football coach at Marshall University two weeks ago.

Huff has gone on a taste testing tour of Huntington and been fed well since being announced as MU’s coach on Jan. 20, but he has found time to push the West Virginia style hotdogs and Tudor’s biscuits to the edges of his plate to focus on his current main course: getting his new staff and returning players on the same page with an eye toward the future in recruiting.

Marshall is expected to officially announce Huff’s complete coaching staff this week along with Wednesday’s National Signing Day festivities, and Huff said it won’t be long until the Herd has some support staff in place. That, he said, is when he and his assistants will really be able to hit the recruiting trail hard. Currently, some of Huff’s new hires have been chipping in on recruiting areas they are familiar with, but Huff said nobody has been locked into assignments for recruiting specifics areas yet.

“I’ve got nine of my 10 coaches on – we’re still waiting on the HR process for one,” Huff told WVSN on Tuesday. “We have not hired our off-the-field staff, which includes our recruiting coordinator. We haven’t really fully dove into [recruiting] because of the procedure of hiring people at a university — we’ve done a little bit, and we’re not where we will be or where I want to be at this point. I want to get those guys on campus and get those guys around these guys. We’ve started a little bit with just general areas just with where guys have recruited before so we don’t get too far behind the eight ball. It will be probably another week, week and a half before we lock in exactly our operation and our system of how things are going to work.”

The NCAA’s rule to allow players an extra year of eligibility as a result of the pandemic has thrown a bit of a wrench into many coaches’ recruiting plans because until those upperclassmen decide their plans coaches don’t know exactly how many scholarships they have available. For Huff and his staff, add on top of that the fact that they are just getting to know this group of Marshall players and it has not left much wiggle room for the new coach with little time between his hiring and Wednesday’s second signing day for the Class of 2021.

“We won’t be able to do much in this class,” Huff said. “There is a good group of guys who signed but with the new rule that everybody has an extra year [of eligibility] it kind of puts you in a little bit of a bind scholarship-wise. You can’t just go out and sign as many guys as you would like to or take as many guys in the transfer portal as you would like to, but the positive on that is we have a solid team. I always think that whenever you can create depth you create competition, so that is going to be a huge focus for our staff this spring — creating depth with the guys we have.”

If the MU players who have been down the depth chart have been looking for an opportunity to compete, they will get that opportunity this spring. Huff said he likes what he has seen from the older group of players returning for the Thundering Herd, but competition and depth behind those veterans are high on his list of priorities.

“Some of the younger guys who may have not played a lot last year — getting them caught up to speed [is important] so we can have some depth so we can have more competitiveness in practice,” Huff said. “I think we have a very good senior group — a very good group of older guys who played a lot of games here and are in position to continue to play at a high level. To me, you’ve got to have depth on your team because with the ebbs and flows of a season you can be walking into a game with a very strong group and two plays later you can be playing two guys who are young. That’s going to be our focus this spring.”

Still, Huff is well known as an elite recruiter from his time at places like Alabama and Penn State but the new Marshall coach and his staff were put in a tough spot with the timing of his hiring relative to Wednesday’s signing day. There was not a whole lot that could be accomplished with the Class of 2021 in such a short window, so the recruiting trail focus for Huff is now solidly on the Class of 2022.

Huff is taking over a program and a roster that has been successful in recent seasons but obviously was built by someone else. He won’t have to rebuild anything at Marshall, but keeping the Herd at that level or higher is a pressure situation the new coach said he takes very seriously, and that starts with putting in the work now for his first full recruiting class next year.

“We’ve got to do a really phenomenal job of getting out in front of the ’22 class,” Huff said. “Those are the guys who are truly going to keep this program afloat. I’m taking over somebody else’s poker cards at the table right now. I’ve got a pretty good hand and I could probably poker face some guys and get them to overbid here a little bit, but the next shuffle is going to be my hand. I’ve got to do a really good job of making sure the guys we bring in as a staff continue the legacy of really good players here.”