JMU Football Season Preview: Weber State, The Burden of Favoritism, and the Two Games That Will Define the 2025 Season

Welcome to Week 1 of the 2025 college football season! James Madison football opens up Year 4 of its spectacular FBS era on Saturday. 

The Week 1 punching bag of the moment is former FCS playoff foil Weber State – more on the Wildcats in a minute or two. But before we dive into the traditional Week 1 preview, I thought I’d provide you with some standard throat-clearing about what this season could look like.

Three full years in the Sun Belt is evidently enough for everyone to concede that JMU fields the best program in the conference. JMU received 11 of 14 first-place votes in the Sun Belt East’s preseason poll. And if you’re one for college football betting markets, JMU is a +260 favorite to win the conference – dramatically shorter than the next-closest team, Texas State (+600). 

Only one other team in the East is shorter than 10-to-1. That’s Georgia Southern, which plays in Harrisonburg at the end of September.

In the wider national discussion of the College Football Playoff, the Dukes have once again been offseason darlings, often slipping their way into CFP projections as a trendy pick against the preseason status quo of Boise State. (Editor’s Note: Boise State lost its first game of the year on Thursday night.)

I’m a bit skeptical of this widespread coronation. After all, JMU Football lost a ton of talent from last year’s team, which finished the regular season with a respectable 8-4 record. (I wrote more about the broader idea of turnover last week, so feel free to check out that piece below if you missed it.)

The assumption that JMU is a runaway favorite in the face of this heavy turnover is, in my opinion, a bit much. Yet JMU fans are largely optimistic about the roster in spite of its generally unknown status. My hunch is that 2024-to-25 offseason turnover doesn’t feel nearly as dramatic, since the thing that preceded it was the torturous 2023-to-24 levels of offseason turnover. In that case, JMU provided a P4 school with a fully realized playoff-caliber defense & coaching staff, and it all happened in roughly the time it takes to order something from Amazon Prime.

So yes, the 2025 rebuild challenge isn’t that bad. And JMU’s depth of talent appears to be impressive, as Chesney and other media members have frequently alluded to over the past month. But beyond one or two special players, the top level of playmaking talent may be lower than in previous years. 

Or, maybe not. Roster projections in 2025 are more impossible than ever. 

Either way, we’ll have to see how the roster fares against a Sun Belt that shows a parallel depth of teams, with no other obvious juggernauts at the top. Keep an eye on Southern Miss, who was voted to finish fifth in the West despite inheriting most of the coaching staff and players who won last year’s Sun Belt championship at Marshall. They’re my pick for a Western division champ.

For JMU, the success or failure of this season will largely revolve around two huge, consecutive games. And no, next week’s game against Louisville is not one of them.

The first game is Sept. 20 in Lynchburg. Let’s be frank about the Liberty matchup – many of us don’t like them, and many of them don’t like us. I won’t step on any remarks I might want to make in my Week 4 preview, so I’ll just say this: When this season is over and done, I think we all want to remember a win over this team. 

The other game is one week later, when JMU plays its first home game of the year against an FBS opponent. The Sept. 27 conference opener against Georgia Southern should give the winner a clear inside track for the divisional title as calendars flip to October.

JMU can work out the kinks in an ugly game against Weber State, and no one outside of Harrisonburg will remember it a month from now. It can lose to Louisville by four touchdowns in Week 2, and all its goals will still be on the table.

But for the Dukes to have a successful season in 2025, that means winning big games against in-state schools and competing for conference championships. So keep your schedule clear and your cars gassed up in late September, because there aren’t two games bigger than Liberty and Georgia Southern during this year’s regular season. They just happen to be in back-to-back weeks.