For JMU Football, Now Comes the Hard Part

The James Madison football team is officially less than two weeks away from its first game of the season. That means it’s that magical time of year where football is increasingly a fixation in the front corner of the brain.

Personally, I got around this by devoting myself to the dark art of sports writing, which means I get to think about defensive subpackages and call it “work.” (On the down side, I made approximately $38 per year for most of my 20s while following this career path, which was less than ideal.)

Welcome back to a fresh season of JMUSB, where the word of the moment is turnover. Some of that is annually scheduled anxiety, since mid-August is around the time I start fixating on things like Bill Connelly’s returning production notes, or the Action Network’s TARP rankings.

This year, JMU fans who are shaking off the roster memory rust will discover that the Dukes bring back some quality depth from the 2024 campaign, but not much in the way of bona fide starters. The defense retains at least some of its core skeleton with Immanuel Bush, Trent Hendrick, and Jacob Thomas, along with starting nickel DJ Barksdale. 

The offense will need to rely on even more new faces. Carter Sweazie and Pat McMurtrie are the biggest returners on an offensive line facing real turnover. The wide receiver room is drastically different from last season. Many specialists are gone, too. Quarterback Alonza Barnett remains with the team, as does George Pettaway – the leader of an exceptional running back room for a G5 program.

Tailback is one of the clear strengths of the team, with the ceiling of the ground game ultimately tied to how the offensive line turns out. But if you think Barnett is a lock to start next week, then I’ve got a Sun Belt bridge to sell you. It’s hard to return in one offseason after suffering a serious injury on the final play of the year. Not to overgeneralize, but most coaches wouldn’t add multiple starting quarterbacks from other programs via the transfer portal if they were confident in the Week 1 health of their returning starter.

The swirling mystery at quarterback is mostly representative of the larger picture for JMU’s upcoming 2025 team. A few names ring out, and the ceiling is quite high if everything works out. But overall, with this much uncertainty and player turnover, there’s just no way to know what the team will look like or how good it can be until the Dukes take the field for those first three or four games. 

In terms of raw volume of roster turnover, few years will ever compete with the outflow that JMU saw after the great Cignetti departure of 2023. During the 2024 offseason, newly minted FBS coach Bob Chesney had a total of 64 new players for 2024, which is an insane total for a roster that is conventionally capped at 85 scholarship players. 

But this year, JMU is quietly working through another hefty offseason of turnover, with roughly 50 new players on campus between freshmen and new transfer arrivals. 

The thing that struck me this summer – which I wanted to write about today – is that this is likely the new normal for JMU. 

It took less than five years of FBS exposure for the entire college football world to learn what many alumni and fans have known for years: JMU is one of the most well-run, generously funded, and overall top-performing college football programs below the P4 level. And whereas a strong FCS program can often fly below the radar because of its technical classification, a top-line G5 program attracts nonstop attention and tampering. Every year, dozens of programs will be interested in the best coaches, assistants, and playmakers.

And let’s retire any remaining false modesty here – JMU is a top G5 program. According to the college football odds at ye old day job, Harrisonburg’s fourth-year FBS program is a surprisingly large favorite to win the Sun Belt (+280) and has the fifth-best odds of any non-P4 school to make the playoffs. 

The new normal in college football is for bigger programs to feed their machine by constantly nibbling off innovators from below. That’s why half the 2023 JMU team is playing in the Big Ten right now; to be fair, it’s also why some of JMU’s positional groups have resembled FCS All-America teams in recent years.

JMU can play some defense against this trend by maintaining a strong culture and highlighting all the strengths that it has as a university. But even then, annual talent bleed is mostly inevitable.

This is the annual weight that JMU will carry, in perpetuity, until Harrisonburg returns to total football irrelevance.

The upshot? At least we get to keep winning most of the games on Saturday afternoon.

It’s not just the players and coaches that have turned over, though. JMU Football – hell, JMU Athletics in general – built to a crescendo in the early 2020s. Decades of strategic planning and smart, well-coordinated leadership delivered incredible on-field results. I mean, if I walked up to you in 2011 and handed you a list of what would happen in the JMU athletic department from 2015-23, many of you would have stroked out and died right there. Or, even worse, let your kids apply to Virginia Tech.  

But consider the turnover that’s taken place since the beginning of the 2023 academic year:

• JMU President Jon Alger leaves for American University after more than a decade in the position.
• Athletic Director Jeff Bourne retires after 25 years in his position.
• Senior VP for Finance Charlie King fully retires after 25 years as Senior VP for Finance (and, more recently, part-time government relations advisor and Interim President).
• Head football coach Curt Cignetti departs for Indiana after an 11-win season (large majority of team graduates or transfers out).
• Head men’s basketball coach Mark Byington departs for Vanderbilt after a 30-win season (large majority of team graduates or transfers out).
• Chesney football staff loses Defensive Coordinator Lyle Hemphill, who doubled his salary by rejoining his former boss Mike Elko at Texas A&M.

That is an insane amount of brain drain for a G5 program. And it all basically happened in, like, 18 months!

Every successful athletic program goes through ebbs and flows. It’s inevitable. But the benefit of being a major brand-name program is that the media rights deals and attention economy can spike you back to relevance in a way that’s fast and powerful. 

Take a program like Colorado, which had an absolutely dead football program prior to Deion Sanders’ arrival. Many college fans will debate how good Colorado actually is these days, but there’s little doubt that they’ve been a part of the conversation for the last two years. 

Don’t hold your breath for a similar celebrity coach treatment of Michael Vick’s Norfolk State team this year. (That’s assuming you even knew he had become the head coach there in the first place.)

In contrast with their P4 brothers, G5 programs simply must rely on the gradual accumulation of wisdom, equity, and culture – often throughout multiple administrations, quarterback rooms, and coaching regimes.

In 2024, JMU was forced to reckon with a total institutional reset. The vision of Bourne, the shrewdness of King, the industrious brilliance of Cignetti and Byington – all that was flushed after a rush of high-level success. 

Now, it falls to Chesney, Matt Roan, and Jim Schmidt to carry the torch as the most visible members of JMU Athletics, at least for the time being. And Chesney delivered an admiral result in Year 1, given the headwinds he faced. 

But for JMU to return to its high-water marks of the last 10 years – conference titles, national championships, College World Series bids, widespread national acclaim – it’s going to need to restart that uphill climb of strategic planning and institutional vision. And it’s going to have to do that in a more complex environment, where competition is greater and other programs are constantly trying to poach what it has. 

I’ll write a bit more about the actual football product before Week 1 begins in earnest next Monday. But until then, for true JMU fans, spare a moment to consider how much harder the next 10 years will be, relative to the last 10 or 15. 

JMU climbed the FBS mountain. But maintaining that success in this modern age? That’s arguably going to be even harder. The importance of an engaged fan base has never been higher.