JMU Football Preview 2024: Bob Chesney Era Begins With Questions

James Madison football has quickly established itself as one of the top G5 programs in FBS college football. The Dukes recruit well, play consistently, and have a large, brash fanbase. 

That’s a surefire recipe to attract curious bettors. Indeed, JMU football odds are more salient than they’ve ever been in 2024, with the Dukes finally eligible to win the Sun Belt and compete for one of the 12 spots in the expanded college football playoff. 

Today, I’m getting back to my roots and previewing my alma mater’s 2024 football team. 

I’m hoping this will be a good primer not only for fans, but also for bettors more interested in the college football betting side of the equation. (I imagine many readers might fall into both camps.)

After a few conversations with people I trust, and a fair amount of roster research, here’s my early look at the 2024 JMU football program. 

JMU Football Season Preview

Let’s recap the wild prologue to the 2024 season so we’re all on the same page.

In 2022, JMU made one of most successful transitions to FBS in the modern history of college football, finishing with an 8-3 record. The Dukes were the de facto winners of the Sun Belt East. (In practice, JMU was transitionally ineligible for the championship during its first two seasons.)

In 2023, JMU beat in-state big brother Virginia and reigning Sun Belt champ Troy en route to a 10-0 start. College GameDay came a’callin. The Dukes finished 11-1 and appeared to be the clear-cut best team in the Sun Belt. 

Putting together some information now from a few different sources. Will continue to ask around, but for now, here’s what I have been told:#JMU offered Cignetti a seven-digit contract. It was still less than what Indiana offered, but it was a pretty decent offer, all things…

— Chase Kiddy (@chaseakiddy) November 30, 2023

Enter Indiana, who scooped up JMU coach Curt Cignetti (along with many other key coaches and players) in anticipation of a new era of divisionless college football scheduling in the Big Ten. 

JMU athletic director Jeff Bourne, then in his final months on the job ahead of his pending retirement, reached down into the FCS ranks to find yet another strong hire. Bourne tapped Holy Cross head coach Bob Chesney, who built a national power in Worcester, Massachusetts, from practically nothing. 

In the wake of Cignetti’s departure, JMU lost many major contributors — DL James Carpenter, DB D’Angelo Ponds, LB Jailyn Walker, LB Aiden Fisher, QB Jordan McCloud, and RB Kaelon Black, just to name a few. 

Chesney has replaced some of this talent drain by holding some of JMU’s incoming recruiting class together and hitting the transfer portal. He’s assembled a strong coaching staff, with some former coaches from Holy Cross joining him. Fans and bettors can expect a typically well-coached JMU club.

Still, it’s inarguable that this JMU team will take noticeable steps back from its climactic 2023 peak under Cignetti. 

JMU will still field a perfectly competitive team in a potentially weak season for the Sun Belt. Its institutional strength, momentum, and recruiting base will cover up some of the offseason deficits. 

However, JMU may need some lucky breaks and fortuitous development to earn its first official Sun Belt East crown. College Football Playoff chatter is likely better saved for 2025. 

Let’s get specific about some of my preseason observations and assumptions. 

The Run Game

For my money, the strength of JMU’s team this year will be the ground game. 

JMU’s Ayo Adeyi will be one of the better returning running backs at the FBS level this year after playing the previous three seasons at North Texas. He struggles in pass protection but will be in the mix for 1,000 yards and a first-team SBC designation at the end of the season if he stays healthy. 

Adeyi is also running behind an offensive line that may ultimately be the strength of the team. 

Tanner Morris has 24 starts at center over the last two seasons. Cole Potts has 38 starts as an interior lineman since 2021 and should slot in at right guard once again this year. 

Tyshawn Wyatt should return from a season-ending injury against Old Dominion to play left tackle.  

Keep an eye on Jesse Ramil, who transferred from FCS Saint Francis (Pa.) and has the potential and mechanics to blossom into the best OL on the team. 

The Quarterback Room

I’ll talk about expected starter Dylan Morris specifically in a minute, but let’s stick with the larger positional group for a moment. 

One of the only real weaknesses JMU has shown since it began the FBS transition in 2022 is quarterback depth. No team likes losing a starting quarterback, but there’s a difference between moving down to a player who is less effective and resorting to players who are ineffective.

Unfortunately, JMU has mostly had the latter over the last two seasons. 

When Todd Centeio was a late scratch against Marshall in 2022, the offense was unwatchable. The following week, the Cignetti staff practically punted on the Louisville game rather than risk any more injuries.

The 2023 season eventually became a success story for McCloud, but the fact that the coaching staff had no real idea who the correct play was for Week 1 last season is not exactly a ringing endorsement of the accumulated talent on the roster. 

Morris could be the next Sun Belt Offensive Player of the Year, but if he gets hurt, and the rest of the room hasn’t dramatically improved, this team could be in big trouble.

Dylan Morris

Over the last decade, JMU has had great success in identifying successful quarterbacks already at the NCAA level and luring them to Harrisonburg via JMU’s campus charm and facilities. In fact, the only real home-grown quarterback JMU has had since the end of the Mickey era is Cole Johnson. Everyone else was a transfer.

So I’m not skeptical of Morris on those grounds. The scuttlebutt out of camp is that Morris has an unorthodox throwing motion, which is probably going to get more attention than necessary. If the ball is getting to the receivers, and there’s not some unusually high number of knockdowns at the line of scrimmage, I’m not losing too much sleep over the throwing motion at the college level. 

If there’s something to worry about with Morris, it’s his playing history. This is a guy who’s thrown 30 passes since the 2021 season. He hasn’t played as a starter in a long time. 

Maybe he’ll be good. Maybe he’ll even be awesome. Maybe he learned a ton from his time on the two-deep of the 2023 national runner-up Washington Huskies. 

Maybe he’ll join Centeio and Vad Lee and Bryan Schor and Ben DiNucci as one of the guys who came here from somewhere else and finished his career in style. 

But I rarely hear anyone mention this, and I do think it’s at least worth bringing up. Morris might have been a P5 quarterback, but his last real action was as the head man for a four-win team, three seasons ago, which ended with his coach getting fired. 

It is not a given that he’s a plug-and-play success story.

The Passing Game

Let’s broaden the conversation out from Morris to the overall passing game. 

I have no idea what this is going to look like. None. Zero. 

It’s very hard to project anything when virtually everything is new. This is a new head coach, new offensive coordinator, new quarterback, and largely untested pass-catchers. 

Taji Hudson is one name to watch. He earned three starts last season and finished with eight catches for 88 yards. 

Maxwell Moss is a potential projected starter. He caught two passes in 2023. Many of the other receivers on the roster have fewer than that. 

Cameron Ross appears to be the most game-tested of the group. He’s a junior who started six games at UConn and finished the season with more than 500 yards. 

The entire tight end room, as far as I can tell, has 15 career catches. 

A lack of historical production does not automatically mean bad things. But if you’re looking for a black box, this is it. It’s very hard to know what this passing game looks like, or how effective it will be, until JMU takes the field in Charlotte on Aug. 31. 

The Defense

JMU has made a living in recent years off a ferocious defense led by an elite defensive front with an effective pass rush. 

That powerful pass rush has often covered for a leaky secondary, which hasn’t been truly great since the Mike Houston era. Rashad Robinson, Jimmy Moreland, Raven Greene – those guys. It’s been a few years. 

The entire 2023 starting defensive front has departed, with many of the impact players from the front six now starting in the Big Ten. 

Tons of college football prep work these last couple weeks. Here’s one very interesting projected starting defense from a power conference

DE: Mikail Kamara
NG: CJ West
NG: James Carpenter

Star: Jacob Mangum-Farrar
LB: Jailin Walker
LB: Aiden Fisher

Rover: Amare Ferrell
CB:…

— Chase Kiddy (@chaseakiddy) July 9, 2024

That doesn’t mean JMU is without talent on the defensive side of the ball. Immanuel Bush should do an admirable job replacing James Carpenter as the nose man in the middle. Linebackers Taurus Jones and Jacob Dobbs will almost certainly be the sharpest teeth of the defense. 

I don’t think the 2024 defense will be an all-time JMU unit, but it will still be a well-coached group that competes at the top end of the Sun Belt. 

FCS Transfers & Impact Players

During his time in Harrisonburg, Cignetti and his staff often showed adeptness at pulling the exact right player up from a random FCS school, even when JMU was still in the FCS. 

So far, Chesney also appears to have an eye for FCS talent. Sure, some of his Holy Cross players followed him down the coast, but he also pulled DB Ja’Kai Young from Gardner-Webb, DE Eric O’Neill from Long Island University, and the aforementioned Ramil. 

I think many of these guys could be real contributors on a team that could flirt with 10 wins.

Effective Depth

Historically, JMU has been pretty good at special teams. That’s because it generally had the two ingredients necessary for success: depth and good coaching.

Special teams is one area I expect JMU to take a step back in 2024. Following the end of the 2023 season, there was a real glut of graduations and transfers, and I suspect it’s going to take the Dukes a year or two to rebuild the stockpile of talent that overflows the two-deep and powers the unsexy parts of the football machine.

At the risk of sounding banal, injuries are going to be more injurious to the team this season. In 2024, it may not be a given that there’s a next guy up, ready to play at 90 or 95% efficacy. 

The Schedule 

This is almost certainly the biggest thing going for JMU in 2024. After a tough 2023 schedule that included several difficult road trips, JMU’s football schedule has now flipped to the other side of the luck spectrum. 

Madison’s opening five games in 2024 include tune-up opportunities against Charlotte, FCS Gardner-Webb, Ball State, and ULM – the last of which is a fortuitous cross-divisional road draw from the Sun Belt West. 

Even the annual P4 opponent – North Carolina – is slightly defanged after losing first-round draft pick Drake Maye. 

Even if JMU is a clear second-tier G5 team this season, there’s still a realistic chance to be 10-0 or 9-1 going to App State in November. 

JMU Win Total 2024 

At the BetMGM online sportsbook, JMU’s win total is 8.5. The under is juiced at -160, meaning the market expects 8-4 more than it does 9-3. 

For all the win totals and college football odds at BetMGM, make sure you check out my broader college football win totals mega-preview, as well as my G5 win totals overview. 

JMU Win Total Prediction 2024

I am predicting over 8.5 wins for JMU.

Relative to some of the other media I have consumed this summer, I have pretty serious concerns about how good this JMU team can be. The amount of brain drain and talent loss that JMU experienced after the 2023 season is not easily replaced.

However, JMU still has a lot of talent, relative to the average G5 program, and I have a lot of respect for what Chesney did at Holy Cross. I believe he will be yet another successful hire in Harrisonburg. 

I believe JMU’s high floor will carry it through a relatively easy schedule. The Dukes are likely to be on the threshold of covering this 8.5 number as the calendar flips to November, with winnable home games still to come against Georgia State and Marshall. 

The market is expecting typical G5 regression after a major departure, which is understandable. But the market is failing to account for Chesney’s skills as a coach and JMU’s overall talent hold. It’s rarely assumed that a non-power school will replace one great coach with another, but this is what Bourne & Co. have made a living off of for decades. 

I also think the market is overestimating how competitive some early games will be. Charlotte is a trendy dog pick for College Football Week 1, but I don’t see the 49ers outplaying JMU. Coastal Carolina may be a totally dead program in 2024 that is currently expected to compete for a bowl bid. 

Still some work to do, but I’m starting to think the best bet pretty much anywhere in here is Coastal Carolina Under 6.

Market doesn’t understand how much is being downgraded with McCall gone.

60+ new players on the team. Plays Troy & Louisiana from West; UVA, JSU non-con.

— Chase Kiddy (@chaseakiddy) August 5, 2024

Overall, my expectation is that the 2024 incarnation of JMU will be a decent team whose record will make it look a bit better than it actually is. 

In the short term, that may hurt JMU fans. Imagine a Week 13 game against App State that’s billed as a big showdown but turns into a rout. Imagine a middling bowl game that JMU loses despite playing as a favorite. 

In the long term, though, JMU’s paper record may help it maintain its strong recruiting posture in the mid-Atlantic, which will help it rebuild the roster so that it can legitimately compete for a G5 CFP berth. 

I believe Chesney and JMU will be in great position for the CFP in Year 2 and Year 3 – assuming another P4 program doesn’t snatch him up before that.