Oh, wait… I see, we should be talking about James Madison. Universitynot James Madison the president. Well, that makes a lot more sense. JMU, located in the charming Shenandoah Valley college town of Harrisonburg, Virginia, makes its first appearance in the College Football Playoff this weekend. His presence in the group is a reminder of what makes college football great, even if the Dukes slipped through a door that will likely be boarded shut after this season.
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Since this is probably the first time much of the country has seen, or even heard of, the JMU Dukes, let’s answer two questions: 1. How the heck did James Madison get into a tournament alongside giants like Ohio State and Georgia, and 2. Do the Dukes have any hope against the Ducks?
The first question is easy, although there is a bit of background. James Madison has spent the better part of a century as a member of the FCS and generally kicking the crap out of most of his opponents. The Dukes won FCS national titles in both 2004 and 2016, and then decided to make the jump to the FBS level.
JMU joined the FBS Sun Belt Conference in 2022 and immediately continued to attack almost everyone in sight, even earning a brief but still impressive top-25 ranking at one point in the debut season. Those Dukes were trained by a gentleman named Curt Cignetti. (These two sentences are very connected.)
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Since joining the Sun Belt, JMU has posted seasons of 8, 11, 9 and 12 wins and counting. That’s not bad! This year’s team is in the playoffs thanks to a combination of talent and timing, winning the Sun Belt in the exact year the ACC screwed up and somehow allowed a five-loss Duke team to win the conference title. That allowed JMU, through a rules quirk that will surely never be allowed again, to be the second Group of Five team in the field, after Tulane.
So they started from the FCS and now they are here. Does JMU have anything resembling a chance against the mighty Oregon Ducks? Only if that opportunity passes through the defense.
James Madison ranked second behind Ohio State nationally in team defense, allowing 247.6 yards per game. The Dukes also rank fifth in third down defense, allowing conversions at a rate of just 28.7 percent. That’s good! What’s not so good: James Madison compared those numbers to Sun Belt competition, and Oregon surely isn’t Sun Belt-level competition.
As our own Nick Bromberg points out, the Dukes will play in Autzen Stadium, which has a capacity approaching three times the size of JMU’s home field. The Dukes will also face a preseason Heisman favorite and potential NFL first-rounder in quarterback Dante Moore, who has thrown for 2,733 yards and 24 touchdowns against six interceptions this season. His JMU counterpart, Alonza Barrett III, has totaled 2,533 yards, 21 touchdowns and eight interceptions so far this year.
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The Dukes initially prepared for Oregon while the rest of the campus took on the finals, which required some restraint in the stadium. “We had a couple of speakers and that was it, but now we’ll be able to go live in the stadium and make sure it’s as loud as possible,” head coach Bob Chesney said earlier this week. “We want to try to get to a point where we can’t even hear each other on both sides of the ball, knowing that it will affect the offense and special teams more than the defense, but that’s definitely what we’re launching into. We have all their songs, all the things they do, their band, everything we were able to put together is what we’re putting out there for our guys, so that’s something they’ve heard before.”
The fascinating thing about James Madison is that, in a way, there are two Dukes teams in this playoff. When Cignetti left JMU for Indiana in 2023, he took a large portion of JMU’s roster with him, including wide receiver Elijah Cooper, who leads Indiana with 12 touchdowns, and Kaelon Black, Indiana’s second-leading rusher on the year. It’s a testament to Chesney’s work that the Dukes didn’t miss a beat.
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And soon they will have to do it all again; Chesney accepted a job at UCLA and, unlike a few people we could name, will coach the Dukes for their entire playoff run. James Madison will replace him with former Florida coach Billy Napier.
The Dukes have a long way to go to compete week in and week out with titans like Oregon. But they have remained competitive despite losing players and coaches to larger programs. And that still counts for something in the eyes of college football fans, if not short-sighted playoff-obsessed ones.
“The style in which we perform is something that’s probably hard to distinguish in a movie,” Chesney said. “Our guys play an inspired, confident, offensive style of football, period, in all phases. That’s something that has to be very important when you walk into this arena. That’s really it. I want the world to know how tough these guys are, how competitive they are, how much they play with each other and with each other.”