On the evening of November 14, 1970, Southern Airways Flight 932, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9 chartered by Marshall University to transport the Thundering Herd football team back to Huntington, West Virginia, crashes into a nearby gully after clipping trees on a ridge just one mile short of the runway at Tri-State Airport in Ceredo, West Virginia, killing all 75 people on board.
The 37 players, head coach Rick Tolley and five members of his coaching staff, Charles E. Kautz, Marshall's athletic director, team athletic trainer Jim Schroer and his assistant, Donald Tackett, sports information director and radio play-by-play announcer Gene Morehouse, 25 boosters, and five crew members are among those who died.
Following the tragedy, University President Donald Dedmon considers suspending the football program forever, but is persuaded to reconsider after hearing from Marshall students and Huntington citizens, particularly the few football players who did not make the flight, headed by Nate Ruffin. Despite losing many of their prospects to the West Virginia University Mountaineers, Dedmon recruits Jack Lengyel as head coach, who, with the support of Red Dawson (one of two surviving members of the former coaching staff), rebuilds the squad in a relatively short period. Dedmon travels to Kansas City to petition the NCAA to waive the regulation that prevents freshmen from participating in varsity football (a rule which had been abolished in 1968 for all sports except for football and basketball, and would be permanently abolished for those sports in 1972). Dedmon triumphs once more.