Marshall Thundering Herd set to head to South Carolina in 2018

So remember all that brouhaha about the restrictions the P5 conferences were making about not playing FCS teams and things of that sort? Well, we mentioned how this would simply increase how much money G5 teams got for their own guaranteed games, and we now have a good example of that payoff.

The Herd will be heading to Columbia, SC to take on "The Team Formerly Known as the Fightin' Hatin' Ass Spurriers" the Gamecocks, and they'll be getting a $1.4 million guaranteed payout to do so. Soak it in, because that's the largest such payout in the history of Marshall's football program.

Perhaps this makes the 2018 schedule a little more challenging, as this now means that they'll travel to South Carolina and then come back home to host NC State the very next week, though I suppose that's only as challenging as the relative quality of each of those three teams two years from now. But even if that's the case, the Herd fan base gets a nice lump sum of money added to their coffers, and a game against a big name team that's within not-unreasonable driving distance.

The Herd's future schedules were already shaping up pretty nicely, but they now have a pretty solid feather in the cap of 2018's slate.