Marshall Thundering Herd needed exactly one more answer than South Alabama had in them on Tuesday night, and Judah Price gave it to them. Price scored on a 5-yard run with 1:49 remaining to put Marshall back ahead for good, and the Herd held on from there for a 20-13 win that was a lot more stressful than it should have been.
Here's the shape of it: Marshall built the kind of lead that usually lets a team coast into the fourth quarter, then watched South Alabama chip away with a late touchdown that flipped the momentum right back to the Jaguars' sideline. That's when Price went to work, taking it in from 5 yards out to reclaim the lead with under two minutes on the clock. Marshall's defense then had to get one more stop, and it did, closing out a 20-13 final that will go in the book as a win and nothing more, but anyone who watched it knows it was closer to a survival.
Tuesday night kickoffs are a quirk of the Group of Five scheduling calendar, a way for programs like Marshall and South Alabama to grab a national television window that the Power Four conferences don't want on a weeknight. It's not glamorous, but it's real football, and Tuesday's game had a real finish: a lead, a response, and a response to the response, which is about as honest a description of midseason Sun Belt football as you'll get.
For Marshall, the result keeps the Herd's season moving in the right direction, though a defense that let South Alabama climb back into a game it looked like it had put away is the thing the coaching staff will be using the film room to fix this week. For South Alabama, the late touchdown was a sign of life in a game that could have gotten away from the Jaguars much earlier, and there's something to build on there even in a loss.
Both programs roll on into whatever's left of their conference schedule, and the fourth quarter Marshall just played, the one where a comfortable lead turned into a one-score nail-biter, is exactly the kind of tape a staff reviews hardest the morning after a win.