Coastal's season has been a string of near-misses with one bad night mixed in. The Chanticleers lost by 7 at West Virginia, by 8 at Delaware and by 7 at home to Georgia Southern in their Sun Belt opener, with a 17-point home loss to Liberty in between. That's a team close enough to make games uncomfortable and not good enough to finish them. The skid is at 3 straight, and 3 of the 4 losses came at Brooks Stadium or on the road against teams they could've beaten.
Fordham45-7
Gardner-Webb36-35
Marshall's 3-2 record looks better than the team does. All 3 wins came by one score: 28-26 over Middle Tennessee, 30-24 at Missouri State and 36-35 over Gardner-Webb. Those are 9 points of combined margin. The 2 losses were a 45-0 shutout at Penn State and the 28-point loss to JMU. The Herd haven't beaten anybody comfortably, and the teams that could actually move them off the ball beat them badly.
So the matchup comes down to whether Coastal can do what JMU just did. If the Chanticleers can run the ball and hang around into the fourth quarter like they did against West Virginia, Delaware and Georgia Southern, Marshall's habit of living in close games puts this right on a coin flip. The forecast is mild, around 73 degrees and cloudy with almost no wind, so the weather won't bail out either defense.
For Marshall, this is the softer half of a rough Sun Belt start, at home against a team that hasn't won since mid-September. For Coastal, it's a road game against a defense that just gave up 206 rushing yards to one back. Both are good reasons for the losing team to worry about how October goes from here.