Southern Miss at JMU: Official 2024 JMUSB Game #8 Preview
Happy Homecoming!
For everyone making their way back to Harrisonburg this weekend, travel safely and have a great time.
The football game will take place at Bridgeforth in the midafternoon. For those of you looking to fill up on Homecoming events, remember that the biggest game of the weekend is not at Bridgeforth Stadium at all!
JMU Men’s Soccer is hosting No. 6 West Virginia at Sentara Park at 7 p.m., and there are some major postseason implications on the line.
If you’re looking for an evening activity, or the football Dukes are up 38 at the start of the fourth quarter, you might consider a quick trip down Port Republic to watch one of the biggest JMU athletics games of the year.
As we like to say, JMU is indeed an Everything School, and men’s soccer may very well be in the hunt for a national championship this season. Consider supporting them on Saturday night!
Now, let’s talk football.
The Basics
Matchup: Southern Miss (1-6, 0-3 Sun Belt) at JMU (5-2, 1-2 Sun Belt)
Kickoff: 3:30 p.m. EDT, Bridgeforth Stadium in Harrisonburg, VA
Weather: 65 and Partly Sunny. The football gods are serving up a nearly perfect day of late-October weather for JMU Homecoming.
Broadcast: ESPN+
Day Job Numbers: JMU -24, ML -3000; O/U 53.5
It’s fascinating to watch a team get thoroughly dominated on the road, then come back and play as a 24-point favorite one week later. But Southern Miss really is this bad, and JMU has shown a tendency for frontrunning this season. I won’t be surprised when JMU covers this number.
How We Got Here
It doesn’t take long to go from darling to dope. After the Ball State game on Sept. 28, the Dukes had wrung up 133 points in two weeks. Everything seemed possible.
One month later, JMU is 1-2 in conference play. The first loss, at UL Monroe on Oct. 5, was written off as what my Appalachian parents and grandparents might call a shoulda-woulda-coulda game. But a second loss last week at Georgia Southern was more existential in nature.
You didn’t have to look hard to see the question. Perhaps you even asked it yourself.
Are we actually any good?
I should have some deeper thoughts on this during next week’s bye. But it’s probably a good time to remember that old sports maxim – you’re never as good as your best game, and never as bad as your worst game.
This up-and-down season has delivered major highs, but also some of the lowest lows we’ve seen in many seasons. That’s the nature of a rebuilding team with a new coaching staff and 50+ new players. It’s rocky. It’s construction in progress.
In a broader college football sense, it’s all refreshingly… normal.
Two Things to Know About Southern Miss
The Will Hall-Sized Elephant In the Room – College Football Hot Seat is one recurring article I write & update during the football season, and unfortunately, Will Hall had been highlighted for a while before Southern Miss dropped the axe on Sunday.
The Golden Eagles are historically a good, consistent program – they posted 18 consecutive winning seasons through the 1990s and 2000s. Unfortunately, Will Hall took over in 2021 and he finished with a 14-30 record. Half of the wins came in 2022. He’s won two FBS games since the start of last season.
Whenever a college or professional team plays a game in the aftermath of a fired coach, it’s common to expect a bit of a dead cat bounce. Maybe JMU is in the unfortunate position of getting the best punch Southern Miss has to offer. However…
There Is No Sugar-Coating How Bad Southern Miss Is – I mean, it is what it is. I’m not trying to be mean, but this team is really bad. On an EPA/play basis, the Southern Miss offense is the worst in the conference and one of the five worst offenses in FBS college football. They only run about 58 plays per game.
Sophomore Ethan Crawford has taken the snaps at quarterback over the last two weeks, but there’s been no clear answer under center all yeaer.
The defense ranks similarly in EPA/play allowed – it’s the worst in the conference and among the worst in FBS, giving up around 450 yards and 38 points per game.
How JMU Can Win
Execute. Forget about Georgia Southern and conference standings and records and Twitter noise and this blog and whatever else is going on right now. Play the game on the field. JMU is the better team by a wide margin.
The only way JMU loses this game is if it beats itself.
JMUSB Beer of the Week
Southern Tier’s Pumking. Do visit Pale Fire, Restless Moons, Three Notch’d, and many of the other lovely establishments we have downtown on this fine Homecoming weekend! That said, I allow myself to drink a pumpkin beer or two when I’m within 14 days of Halloween, and I’m currently enjoying this annoyingly named brewery from Lakewood, New York.
It’s available all over – DC Whole Foods, Virginia Beach Total Wine shops, RVA Wegmans, and more. They even have it in the Friendly City Food Co-op on Wolfe Street in the ‘Burg.
Official JMUSB Prediction
JMU 49, Southern Miss 10.
Sure, there are questions. But if nothing else, this JMU team has consistently shown it excels when playing from ahead against bad teams – or even good teams who are stuck in one-dimensional situations.
JMU beats Southern Miss to a pulp, and fans have a long bye week to think about what is possible in November.
Okay, Fine, Let’s Talk About Sun Belt Tiebreakers
I didn’t really want to do this yet, but it became too obvious of a potential discussion point when our friends at Old Dominion beat the brakes off Georgia Southern on Thursday night.
So, with a month to play, let’s talk broadly about what JMU needs over the next five Saturdays.
The most important thing – and I really cannot emphasize this enough – is that JMU must continue to win games. It doesn’t matter what happens up and down the eastern seaboard if the Dukes don’t take care of business.
For fans, that means aggressively making plans to travel to Old Dominion on Nov. 16. That game is now critically important.
Now, for the remainder of the Sun Belt…
For most of this week, the discourse has revolved around Georgia Southern taking three late losses and dropping behind JMU in the standings. In the case of a two-way tie atop the division, this is correct. The first tiebreaker for a two-team tie is head-to-head results. If Georgia Southern and JMU both finish 6-2 in the East, with no other teams in the tiebreak, Georgia Southern is the obvious winner.
However, there’s another scenario that feels particularly apt in the everyone-beats-everyone SBC-East. If 3+ teams are tied with the same record, things get complicated – which is good for JMU! From the official tiebreaker rules:
If three or more teams are tied atop a division at the end of the season, the following criteria are used, until one team remains and declared the representative of the Championship game.
1. The team with the highest winning percentage in games played among the tied teams shall be declared the division champion;
2. If still tied, the team with the highest overall divisional winning percentage shall be the division champion;
3. If still tied, each team’s winning percentage vs the team occupying the next highest position in the final divisional standings, and then continuing down through the standings until one team prevails. When arriving at another group of tied teams while comparing records, use each team’s record against the collective tied teams as a group, rather than the performance against individual tied teams. If still tied, combined highest winning percentage against all common non-divisional Conference opponents.
Currently, ODU and Georgia Southern are 3-1 atop the division, while JMU is 1-2.
Imagine a scenario where 1) JMU wins out; 2) Old Dominion wins out except for its head-to-head results against JMU; 3) Georgia Southern loses at Coastal Carolina on Nov. 23 but otherwise wins out.
In this scenario, at least three teams would be 6-2 in SBC play. (If Coastal Carolina wins out, there would actually be four teams in the East at 6-2.)
If Coastal Carolina is included in the tiebreaker, ODU and Georgia Southern would be removed from the tiebreaker because of their inferior round robin record. JMU would win over Coastal.
If Coastal Carolina finishes in fourth place, the three teams would compare their records to fourth-place Coastal using Tiebreaker No. 3, which would award the divisional title to JMU.
There are other scenarios as well, but I don’t necessarily want to create the exhaustive list of scenarios with five games to go.
So, the broad point remains: JMU must take care of business throughout an intense November schedule. It needs a little help from the division, but not quite as much as you might think.
Bona Fortuna, Dukes.
