HUNTINGTON — While the schedule may be different than what the Thundering Herd prepared for going in for preseason camp, the goal remains the same — win the Conference USA championship.

That goal will start with Saturday’s season opener against Eastern Kentucky at 1 p.m..

Marshall expected to open up the season playing at East Carolina in week “zero” but that game was pushed to a later date due to the ongoing COVID-pandemic. Going to be without a game scheduled for week one and two, the Herd was able to quickly get a date worked out with EKU.

One of the few schools that are allowing fans in the stands in limited capacity and playing on opening week, the Herd’s game will also be televised on national TV on ESPN. Making the season opener an even bigger occasion for 10th-year head coach Doc Holliday and his players.

“Any opening week is always a big deal for us as coaches because we love the game. We like to play the game and I’ve always said anytime you can get your program on a national stage, and the great thing is we are going be the only game on at that time. That being said, it’s on a national stage and it’s going to be a lot of fun for our players,” Holliday said. “From the time they’re growing up, they look forward to playing on stages like this. It’s going to be great for our school, going to be great for the football program, and be great for our community. You add that people that aren’t playing with people in the stands. So you have our fans in the stands and it’s gonna be exciting for all of us and we’re actually looking forward to it.”

With Marshall leading the all-time series at 11-8-1, EKU will be making a return trip to Huntington, with the most recent meeting coming in 2018, ending with a 32-16 Herd win.

But the Colonels will have a different look, now under the direction of first-year head coach Walt Wells.

Having previous spells on the EKU coaching staff from 1997-2002 and 2015, Wells became the 15th head coach in program history after spending the last two years as an assistant at Kentucky.

Going 7-5 as a member of the Ohio Valley Conference in the FCS last fall, the Colonels have a big bruising running back in redshirt junior Alonzo Booth, second-team preseason OVC, that will be a handful for Herd defenders to bring down. Weighing in at 250 pounds, Booth did most of his damage coming inside the 10-yard line, scoring eight of his 15 rushing touchdowns, with 673 rushing yards on 140 carries (4.8 YPG).

Also honored by the OVC were offensive linemen Tucker Schroeder and Graham Ashkettle.

“We played these guys a couple years ago here so we got some tape on some of the personnel back from them, but always in those first games there’s a lot of unknowns. Anytime you’re playing a team that got a new coaching staff and etc. So we don’t know exactly what we’re getting. We know their personnel to an extent because we played against them a couple years ago but the personnel has changed a lot,” Holliday said. “We think we have an idea what they’re going to do but you never know, first games you never know and I think the positive thing for us is we got a lot of guys especially up front offensively, that has played a lot of football. So we can make adjustments as we go into the game and that type of thing, but there are going to be some adjustments we have to make early on because we’re gonna see things we haven’t seen.”

Marshall had a quarterback competition after two-year starting QB Isaiah Green entered the transfer portal in the middle of July, but redshirt freshman Grant Wells was named starter by Holliday after an impressive showing during fall camp.

A native of Charleston, and a George Washington High School grad, Wells will become the first West Virginia native to handle those duties since Mark Zban during the 1995 season. Enrolling early as a freshman, Holiday and the coaching staff knew that Wells had all the tools needed to be the Herd’s QB the moment he stepped on campus.

“He came in January of his freshman year, he was well coached at George Washington and we knew he had the skill set from the time when we walked on campus,” Holliday said. “Our players have great confidence in him. In practice he has the ability to make all the throws. He makes tremendous decisions. We see him just grow from practice to practice and become more confident and our players have more confidence in him. So I have total confidence in him going into this game that he’s gonna go out and play well.”

To help ease the young redshirt freshman in his first start will be the C-USA preseason most valuable player Brenden Knox, a redshirt junior. Rushing for league-high 1,387 rushing yards on 270 carries and 11 touchdowns, Knox was honored as the conference MVP last season and will be looking to do more of the same this fall.

Redshirt junior Sheldon Evans will be having a bigger role in the backfield, after rushing for 375 yards and one TD in limited carries as a sophomore.

Herd fans will also get to see many newcomers for the first time on Saturday, when normally they would see them in spring practices.

Wide receiver Jaron Woodyard (redshirt senior from Nebraska) offers some serious speed out wide and junior college transfer sophomore Shadeed Ahmed joins the receiving core that has sophomore Broc Thompson, senior Willie Johnson and sophomore Talik Keaton as well.

You can contact Tyler Bennett at tbennett@newsandsentinel.com