It’s JMU vs. Liberty, and No One Could Possibly Preview This

JMU football will kick off the 2026 season on Saturday with much fanfare in front of a raucous, sellout crowd. The stakes are at least semi-meaningful, as the Dukes will put their 22-game winning streak against in-state opponents on the line. The opponent is Liberty, who isn’t quite an official rival, but it’s also a team any JMU fan with a social media presence probably wants to beat.

Normally for key games, season-openers, and other in-state detritus, I like to write game preview a la the days of yore. But we’re all friends here, so let’s just be totally candid – there’s no real way to write a game preview for this week. I left Harrisonburg years ago. I still talk to people close to the program, but I’m not at preseason camp anymore. I don’t attend practices anymore. 

In other words, I’ve had no exposure to the team, and so it’s hard to provide any kind of meaningful analysis of what Saturday will look like. For that, I’d recommend a visit to the DNR’s Sports page. 

So instead of our usual fanfare, I thought the fairest and most honest two-dimensional preview I could offer would be a visual look at the roster turnover. 

If you don’t obsessively follow personnel movement like it’s the north star, the one thing to know about the start of this season is that JMU is mostly starting over – again. As was the case with the 2024 campaign, much of the previous roster has either graduated or walked out the door to follow their old coach to a new team. That’s the way the world works now in college football, so we offer no ill will and hope everyone succeeds in their next ventures in the Hollywood hills.

Nonetheless, if you look at this year’s starting 22 next to last year’s, you’ll understand how deep the reset is. 

I’ve listed the 2025 starters here, alongside my projection of what the starters could look like. Returners are bolded, and offseason transfers are italicized. I’ve given priority to ETSU transfers who arrived with new offensive coordinator Cam Aiken.

This is not the Gospel of Napier here. I can be wrong about any or all of this. But it’s a guess at what we might see on Saturday when the Dukes take the field against Liberty. And the point of this exercise is to highlight just how different this year’s team will be from last year’s team that ended the season in the College Football Playoff.

JMU has weathered massive changes in the last five years more than once, and so the program will surely weather these, too. But as is the case where there’s any massive institutional turnover, some growing pains are to be expected. 

In 2024, those growing pains involved slow starts, unforced errors, and losses to less talented teams. If JMU experiences something similar this year – especially in the first month of the season – this chart is a good place to come back to.