The No. 5 Georgia Bulldogs are a big favorite against the visiting Marshall Thundering Herd this weekend.

But the players for Marshall aren’t overwhelmed by Georgia. On the contrary, they’re entering Sanford Stadium with some confidence.

“I feel like the first week is the best time to have them because we don’t know what they expect out of them and they really don’t know what they expect out of us because we’re a whole new team, 60-plus new players,” Marshall defensive lineman Katron Evans said in a news conference on Tuesday. “So it’s like it’s the best time to have Georgia, especially being that we’re a Group of Five school and they’re SEC.”

As Evans references, this is a massively different Marshall team than the one that won 10 games and the Sun Belt a year ago. Head coach Charles Huff is now at Southern Miss and Marshall brought in over 60 transfers this offseason. Evans, for example, came from Charlotte, while former NC State defensive coordinator Tony Gibson now runs the program.

Evans is not the only Marshall player to express confidence in how it might be able to handle the more talented Georgia team. Cornerback Marvae Myers pointed to the last Georgia-Marshall game, which saw the Bulldogs come away with a 13-3 win in Athens.

Georgia was ranked as the No. 3 team in the country going into that 2004 game. The Bulldogs would go on to finish that season with a 10-2 record.

“We’ve got history with Georgia,” Myers said. “I’ve seen the last game was a pretty close one, something I’m pretty sure they weren’t expecting. But we’ve just been focusing on not making this just a game where we show up. We’re going to go out there, show heart, and we’re coming to win. We’re not coming out there just to play. We want to win.”

Georgia has the nation’s longest home winning streak, as the Bulldogs have not lost a home game since the 2019 season. Georgia’s last nonconference home loss came against Georgia Tech back in 2016.

Georgia is a 39.5-point favorite against Marshall. And even with a healthy skepticism about what this Marshall team might look like, Georgia coach Kirby Smart knows this new Georgia team can’t take Marshall lightly.

“The opponent is us, and it’s going to be us every week this year,” Smart said. “It is important that we know what they do, and sometimes that’s less information than others.”

Saturday’s game against Marshall is set for a 3:30 p.m. ET kickoff, with ESPN broadcasting the game.