5 Key Questions Ahead of the 2026 JMU Football Season

With the World Cup officially over, and college football only a handful of Saturdays away, I’ve moved into full prep season for this fall. I spent a full morning last week studying quarterback moves in the Transfer Portal. Side note: Did you know that Arizona State has a new starting QB who came over from Kentucky named Cutter? And that a few hundred miles north, Utah State has a quarterback named McCae Hillstead who committed to USU out of high school, transferred to BYU for two years, and is now back at Utah State? 

Yes, I am very in the weeds with my team modeling and Phil Steele magazine these days. A lot of that is for ye olde day job, where I’m churning out preseason college football content with aplomb.

(Annual Editor’s Note: Chase writes about college football odds for BetMGM, which acquired HERO Sports in 2020.)

But this year, with my twin toddlers finally inching toward the end of the pooping and screaming phase, I have more time to do the kind of rigorous JMU summer work that I’ve done in previous years. Given the transitional nature of the 2026 Dukes, I thought a series of quick-hitting thoughts might allow me to cover the most ground.

So, welcome into the 2026 JMUSB summer series, where I’ll offer several rounds of thoughts and observations on JMU football, the Sun Belt, and college football, with a new season around the corner.

Is 9-3 the Official Standard for JMU in an FBS Restart?

How does one write about a restart when the restart is this big? JMU football is piloting through its third seismic change in five seasons, and setting parameters for a season such as this feels tricky. When in doubt, I look for a little historical context.

The Dukes made their FBS debut in 2022, finishing 8-3 in a frenzied year that included the miraculous App State comeback and a weird Georgia State game that everyone has forgotten. The losses were at Louisville with no quarterback, a road game at Georgia Southern, and a fluky, weird home game against Marshall that included a late-in-the-week injury to the quarterback.

In 2024, with Curt Cignetti out and Bob Chesney in, JMU went 9-3 in a season marked by major roster reconstruction.The losses were at App State, a road game at Georgia Southern, and a weird, 2OT home game against Marshall that included a late-in-the-game injury to the quarterback.

You get the idea. Time is a flat circle, something something something. 

In Year 1 of Billy Napier’s return to the Sun Belt, there’s a lot of figurin’ out and roster development to work through. I’ve been bullish on some aspects of the team, like the quality of the coaching staff; I’ve been bearish on other aspects, which I will touch on shortly. 

If we’re setting expectations on a totally blank slate, with very little to go on, then I guess I’ll draw the line around 8.5 wins. If JMU wins eight or nine games in 2026, that would be in line with the historical performance of JMU in a transitional year.

(Not coincidentally, it’s exactly where sportsbooks have drawn the line for JMU, too. The win total for the 2026 Dukes is 8.5 with slight juice to the over.)

Is Old Dominion Ready to Seize the Throne?

There’s a lot of noise this summer about that team over there in Norfolk. Old Dominion has been building its way toward the top of the Sun Belt East, and a lot of people think this could be the year ODU breaks through. The Monarchs won 10 games last season and have been picked near the top of the Sun Belt in a lot of key places this year. They’re second in the East in the Sun Belt Preseason Coaches Poll, second in Phil Steele’s mag, second in the Sun Belt football odds table… you get the idea.

Somewhere around this point, JMU fans can laugh the laugh of the righteous and reference a 4-0 FBS record against ODU, punctuated by last year’s obscene second-half beatdown. And hey, it’s that mid-summer period where everything from previous seasons is hard to recall on demand, so let me jog your memory:

But, young Bodie, the thing about the old days is that they’re the old days. Last year’s game is history, and so the Monarchs are once again coming for the Dukes’ divine right to rule. The general preseason feeling is that the Sept. 26 game will be a key result in deciding the East division this year.

ODU gets JMU in Norfolk this year. Maybe more importantly, ODU will host JMU one week after the Dukes’ West Coast road trip to play a Pac-12 opponent. (More on this coming.)  However the rosters might shake out, the game circumstances look like a big advantage for Old Dominion this year. 

This will be one of ODU’s best opportunities to win a conference championship at the FBS level, and the winner of the Week 4 game will surely be the conference favorite heading into October.

Can Billy Napier Avoid the Mid-Career Crashout?

College football fans are familiar with certain archetypal career trajectories. One common tract is the hot young coach who flames out once he climbs to the level of being a P4 coach.

There are a lot of reasons for this. Sometimes, schemes get exposed at the top level of the sport. Or, some coaches lose their taste for the work ethic grind after they reach their years-long goal, only to get repeatedly punched in the face by other established programs. Or, some coaches got away with bad procedures and practices at lower levels that won’t cut it in the big leagues.

The result is that a once-successful coach becomes a mid-career failure. They take a job at a G6 school, or an FCS program, only to flame out there, too. They’re broken, and for whatever reason, they can’t put it back together.

There are a lot of Florida fans – like, a lot – who are obsessed with the idea of watching new JMU head coach Billy Napier enter this cycle. His tenure at Florida wasn’t successful, and so the only thing this kind of fan has left is hate-watching the Napier nadir.

Beyond the fact that some sad SEC fans in faraway lands need a little therapy, I’ve always been a little fascinated in the pigeonholing of Napier as a toxic asset. The guy turned 47 last week. That makes him younger than Bob Chesney. Yet the budget line on Napier is that he’s old and broken. Perspective is a hell of a drug, no?

Napier isn’t a “classic” JMU hire in any sense. He’s not an up-and-coming coach the administration scraped out of some undersized office at a Division II school. He’s a national name, looking to restore the allure and bargaining power that the original Sun Belt Billy had at Louisiana in 2021. 

And JMU has something to offer now for established coaches now, too: Resource advantage. By coming to the school that virtually every football coach finds some level of success at, Napier puts himself in a great position to remind everyone that he is still a very good coach. It might be the most even transaction that’s ever taken place between JMU football and its new head coach hire. 

In this way, Harrisonburg looks like the antithesis of Gainesville. Florida has become a job where it’s nearly impossible to win because the expectations are unrealistic and the resource advantage is nonexistent. At JMU, by contrast, the resource advantage relative to the level of competition makes it nearly impossible to lose. 

Where Does the Sun Belt Sit in the Conference Pecking Order?

This is an interesting time for non-power football. Playoff access is still guaranteed, but the “top five conference champions” loophole that allowed both JMU and Tulane to make the College Football Playoff last year has been closed. 

Going forward, the non-AQ conferences will be represented by whatever team the committee chooses to place at the highest position in its own rankings. Functionally speaking, that means there are no real metrics or championships in play anymore. This is a pure beauty contest – may the prettiest brand win.

That’s a potential problem for the Sun Belt, which has taken a step back in the last 1-2 years after a lot of brain drain. Coaches and players are regularly leaving the conference at the end of each year, seeking AAC or middle-class P4 opportunities. That, in turn, hollows out the conference and makes it a less competitive space for teams with high aspirations to thrive.

Now, let’s add in one more variable for 2026 – the restoration of the Pac-12, albeit as a non-power conference. What once was the G5 is now the G6, with former Sun Belt mate Texas State bolting the conference to join a small, best-of-the-bunch grouping with Boise State, San Diego State, and other former Mountain West teams. 

The Pac-12 and American conferences are going to battle it out as the top non-P4 groups. And let me be the first to say that I’m pretty skeptical of this new Pac-12, since the branding is doing a lot of the work. 

But the Sun Belt has to take the world as it is, which means scheduling aggressively and winning games to prove it belongs in these conversations. As the top program in the Sun Belt, JMU should shoulder some responsibility in making a national case that affirms the strength of the league. To that end, the program has a rare head-to-head opportunity this September when it travels to play San Diego State in Week 3. 

As you can imagine, there won’t be many Sun Belt vs. Pac-12 matchups. So this is a marquee opportunity for the Sun Belt to make a statement by having its No. 1 preseason team dominate the Pac-12’s No. 2 preseason team on the road. 

As an addendum to the point, I’ll briefly mention the G6 College Football Playoff tracker I debuted at my day job this week. If you’re the kind of JMU fan who’s very focused on playoff positioning, you may be interested to see where the Dukes are starting the year and who is considered our top playoff competition. I plan to update this throughout the season, so I hope it will become a cool tool for G6 fans of all stripes!

When Will JMU’s Next Great Quarterback Show Up?

I don’t quite know how to talk about the JMU quarterback position these days. Both Alonza Barnett (2025) and Jordan McCloud (2023) won Sun Belt Offensive Player of the Year during their tenure in Harrisonburg, but I think most careful readers know that I wasn’t a big fan of either player. 

I don’t begrudge anyone here, and I hope AB3 succeeds in his new role at UCF. But in my opinion, JMU has been in a bit of a quarterback lull since Todd Centeio ran out of eligibility at the end of 2022. 

On the whole, JMU has been radically successful in its FBS era, producing gobs of talented players and gaudy stats. My view is that individual quarterback success has largely been a function of that broader team success, rather than directly powered by high-level quarterback play. In some games, the team seems to have won in spite of its quarterback play. 

Reasonable people can disagree here, and I’ve listened to criticism in the past that I’m looking too harshly at the last three years of the JMU offense. But I still feel compelled to ask the question: When will the next great quarterback appear on the field at JMU?

The Dukes had a great run of quarterbacks through the end of the FCS era, starting with Vad Lee. (If only his defenses had given him something to work with on the other side of the ball.) Bryan Schor, Ben DiNucci, Cole Johnson – these guys were all flawed quarterbacks who nonetheless played great FCS football in JMU’s final decade in the lower subdivision. 

Is the next great JMU quarterback on the roster right now? JC Evans, Camden Coleman, Arrington Maiden, Tanner Vibabul – these are the names in the quarterback room as of right now. (Davi Belfort is now playing wide receiver.)

Can one of them grab the position and begin casting their own legend in the next chapter of JMU football? The opportunity has arguably never been wider. 

If not, this question could hang over the entire season, turning a potentially talented roster into a season of missed opportunity.