2001 GMAC Bowl

The 2001 GMAC Bowl, a college football bowl game held on December 19 at Ladd–Peebles Stadium in Mobile, Alabama, pitted the Marshall Thundering Herd, then of the Mid-American Conference, against the East Carolina Pirates from Conference USA. This game featured what was then the biggest comeback in NCAA Division I-A (now Division I FBS) bowl history, as Marshall came back from a 38–8 halftime deficit to force overtime and eventually win 64–61 in double overtime. It was also the highest-scoring bowl game in history, breaking the previous record set when Texas Tech defeated Air Force 55–41 in the 1995 Copper Bowl.^[1] Although the record for greatest bowl comeback was broken by Texas Tech when it returned to the Copper Bowl, by then renamed the Insight Bowl, in 2006,^[2] the 2001 GMAC Bowl remains the highest-scoring bowl game ever.^[3]

The game, with an official attendance of 40,139,^[4] was telecast on ESPN2.^[5] It was a rematch of one of Marshall's most historically significant games. On November 14, 1970, the two teams met at East Carolina, with the Pirates winning 17–14. That night, the plane carrying the Herd back to Huntington, West Virginia crashed just before landing, killing all 75 on board. The two teams had only met one time since the crash, a 45–0 East Carolina win in 1978.^[6] They later played every year from 2005 to 2013, when both schools were members of the C-USA East Division.