James Madison was the fourth president of the United States, a statesman and a scholar renowned for his role in the creation of the U.S. Constitution. James Madison is currently a 20.5-point underdog to Oregon in the College Football Playoff, which seems surprisingly close given that Madison has been dead for nearly 200 years.
Ah, wait … I see, we should be discussing James Madison University, not James Madison the president. OK, that makes a lot more sense. JMU, located in the lovely Shenandoah Valley college town of Harrisonburg, Virginia, makes its first appearance in the College Football Playoff this weekend. Its presence in the bracket is a reminder of what makes college football great, even if the Dukes snuck in through a door that’s likely to be boarded shut after this season.
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Since this is likely the first time much of the country has seen, or even heard of, the JMU Dukes, let’s answer two questions: 1. How in the world did James Madison get into a tournament alongside behemoths like Ohio State and Georgia, and 2. Do the Dukes have any hope against the Ducks?
The first question is easy, though there’s a bit of backstory. James Madison has spent most of the century as a member of the FCS, and generally kicking the hell out of most of its opposition. The Dukes won FCS national titles in both 2004 and 2016, and later decided to make the leap to the FBS level.
JMU joined the FBS’s Sun Belt Conference in 2022 and immediately continued whomping on nearly everyone in sight, even earning a brief-but-still-impressive top-25 ranking at one point that debut season. Those Dukes were coached by a gentleman named Curt Cignetti. (These two sentences are very much connected.)
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Since joining the Sun Belt, JMU has posted seasons of 8, 11, 9 and 12-and-counting victories. That’s not bad! This year’s team is in the playoffs through a combination of talent and timing, winning the Sun Belt in the exact year that the ACC tied itself in knots and somehow let a five-loss Duke team win the conference title. That allowed JMU, through a quirk of rules that surely will never be permitted again, to be the second Group of Five team in the field, after Tulane.
So they started from the FCS, now they’re here. Does JMU have anything approaching a chance against the mighty Oregon Ducks? Only if that chance runs through the defense.
James Madison ranked second to Ohio State nationally in team defense, allowing 247.6 yards per game. The Dukes also rank fifth in third-down defense, allowing conversions at just a 28.7 percent rate. That’s good! What’s not so good: James Madison stacked those numbers against Sun Belt competition, and Oregon is most assuredly not Sun Belt-level competition.
As our Nick Bromberg notes, the Dukes will be playing in Autzen Stadium, which boasts a capacity approaching three times the size of JMU’s home field. The Dukes will also face a preseason Heisman favorite and potential NFL early first-rounder in quarterback Dante Moore, who’s 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 was taking finals, which necessitated a bit of moderation at the stadium. “We had a couple of speakers out there and that was it, but now we’ll be able to go live in the stadium and make sure it’s loud as it can be,” head coach Bob Chesney said earlier this week. “We want to try and make it to where we can’t even hear each other on both sides of the ball, knowing that it will affect the offense and the special teams more than it will the defense, but that is definitively what we’re jumping into. We have all their songs, all the things they do, their band, everything we could gather is what we’re putting on display out there for our guys, so that’s something that they’ve heard before.”
What’s fascinating about James Madison is there are, in a way, two Dukes teams in this playoff. When Cignetti left JMU for Indiana in 2023, he took with him a huge chunk of the JMU roster, 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 the work of Chesney that the Dukes didn’t miss a beat.
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And soon they’ll have to do it all again; Chesney has accepted a job with UCLA and, unlike some people we could name, he will coach the Dukes for the entirety of their playoff run. James Madison will replace him with former Florida coach Billy Napier.
The Dukes have a long way to go to be competing week-in, week-out with titans like Oregon. But they’ve remained competitive despite losing both players and coaches to larger programs. And that still counts for something in the eyes of college football fans, if not the myopically playoff-obsessed.
“The style in which we play is something that is probably hard to tell from film,” Chesney said. “Our guys play a confident, inspired, attacking style of football, period, in all phases. That is a thing that has to be at a premium as you walk into this arena. That’s really it. I want the world to know how tough these guys are, how competitive these guys are, how much they play for and with each other.”
