Most programs that just won a conference title and made the College Football Playoff spend the following offseason trying to keep the band together. James Madison spent its offseason watching the band walk out the door with its old coach. Bob Chesney left for UCLA and took 13 players with him. Nineteen Dukes total transferred up to the Power Four level once the coaching change opened the portal floodgates. Of the roster that went 12-2, won the first Sun Belt championship in program history, and made the first CFP appearance in conference history, only three starters are actually back.
That’s the story of James Madison’s 2026 season before a single game is played: a proven, thriving program essentially rebuilding itself in real time, under a first-year head coach, with a roster held together by tape and portal additions. The oddsmakers and the preseason media still like the Dukes — Sun Belt East favorites, +150 to win the division — but that confidence is riding almost entirely on institutional reputation, not on returning production.
Billy Napier Gets a Redemption Arc, If He Wants It
The headline hire is the story by itself. Billy Napier was fired at Florida in October 2025 after going 22-23 over three-plus seasons in Gainesville — a disappointing tenure by any measure for a coach who was supposed to be one of the sport’s rising stars. Now he’s back in the Sun Belt, the conference where he actually built his reputation: a 40-12 record at Louisiana from 2018-21, back-to-back Sun Belt titles, and a level of sustained dominance in the league that made him the clear choice when JMU needed someone who could walk in and not blink at the scale of the rebuild.
It’s a fitting landing spot. Napier has said publicly that “success leaves clues,” and there are plenty sitting around Harrisonburg — Curt Cignetti went 52-9 building JMU’s FCS-to-FBS jump, Mike Houston won an FCS national title there, and Chesney just took the program to the Playoff. Napier isn’t walking into a rebuild in the traditional sense. He’s walking into a machine that works, minus almost everyone who was operating it last season.
The Quarterback Race Nobody Outside Harrisonburg Is Talking About Enough
This is the single biggest swing factor for the season, and it’s still unresolved as fall camp winds down. Alonza Barnett III, the quarterback who threw for 5,404 yards and 49 touchdowns over the past two seasons and helped power an offense that averaged 37-plus points and ranked in the nation’s top 15 in total yardage, is gone to UCF via the portal. In his place: a genuine open competition that Napier has been unusually tight-lipped about.
It’s down to two names — redshirt sophomore JC Evans, a JMU lifer who helped the Dukes win the 2024 Boca Raton Bowl and has made his mark mostly as a runner (21 carries, 125 yards, two scores across two seasons), and Camden Coleman, who Napier has praised alongside Evans specifically for “knowledge,” “ability to execute,” and leadership. A third name, Memphis transfer Arrington Maiden, was in the mix earlier in the offseason but appears to have fallen behind as camp progressed.
Coleman is the more interesting case, and undersold in most of the outside coverage. He’s a transfer from Richmond, where he went 13-1 as the starter and was named third-team All-CAA in 2024 — a season in which he threw for 2,031 yards and 14 touchdowns against five interceptions on 65 percent passing, and added 342 rushing yards and six more scores on the ground. He arrived at JMU last year and redshirted the 2025 season without playing a snap, so he’s unproven in this specific offense but not unproven as a college starter — he’s actually the closest thing to a known commodity in this competition, just at a level below the Sun Belt. Evans, by contrast, has barely thrown a college pass. Whoever wins the job is inheriting a passing attack that lost its best receivers along with its old quarterback, but the “two unknowns” framing you’ll see elsewhere undersells Coleman specifically.
The Ground Game Gets a New Face, Not New Ideas
James Madison also loses Wayne Knight, who led the entire Sun Belt in rushing with 1,373 yards last season and left for UCLA with Chesney. Taking his place is George Pettaway, who started at running back in 2024 and ran for 980 yards at 6.0 yards per carry that year before losing snaps in 2025. It’s not a downgrade in pedigree so much as a return to a proven commodity — and new offensive coordinator Cam Aiken, a run-game specialist by background, has already signaled the offense will lean on the ground game while the quarterback situation sorts itself out.
The offensive line is a legitimate bright spot amid the turnover. Center Zach Greenberg, a second-team All-Sun Belt performer, is back and anchoring a line that otherwise required a near-total rebuild through the portal — the staff brought in a group of transfers who are, structurally speaking, enormous, headlined by 6-foot-6, 325-pound tackle Frankie Tinilau. Napier has jokingly called the group the “Great Wall of Shenandoah.” If that line holds up early, it buys the new quarterback and Pettaway time to find rhythm together.
The Defense Loses Its Best Players, Too — But Keeps Its Anchors
JMU’s defense was nearly as dominant as its offense in the Playoff run, and it took hits of its own this offseason, now under new coordinator Robert Bala. Defensive linemen Sahir West (the 2025 Sun Belt Freshman of the Year and a second-team All-Sun Belt pick) and Aiden Gobaira (third-team All-Sun Belt) are both gone, and the secondary loses DJ Barksdale, a third-team All-Sun Belt defensive back. Reigning Sun Belt Defensive Player of the Year Trent Hendrick, the inside linebacker who anchored the whole unit, exhausted his eligibility after the 2025 season and is gone as well — a genuinely brutal loss at the position that runs most modern defenses. (Hendrick has since taken advantage of a court ruling granting a group of players a fifth season of eligibility and committed to UCLA, reuniting with Chesney — a footnote for JMU at this point, since he wasn’t walking back into Harrisonburg regardless of the ruling.) What’s left is still solid: defensive linemen Amar Thomas and Mychal McMullin return as established contributors up front, giving Bala’s group a foundation to build from even without last year’s headline names at linebacker, line, and secondary.
A Schedule Built to Forgive a Transition Year
This is where James Madison catches a real break. There’s no Power Four opponent anywhere on the 2026 slate — the toughest non-conference test is a trip to San Diego State, sandwiched between a home opener against in-state rival Liberty and a home date with Wagner. Sun Belt play opens with a road trip to Old Dominion on Sept. 26, followed by a stretch that includes Marshall and Georgia State at home, road games at Georgia Southern and Appalachian State, a Thursday night home date with West Division favorite Troy, a trip to Southern Miss, a late-season visit to UConn, and the regular-season finale at home against Coastal Carolina.
The Sun Belt East is genuinely JMU’s to lose — Marshall (the 2024 conference champ) and Old Dominion (last year’s top challenger) are the only teams picked ahead of the pack behind the Dukes, and both come to Harrisonburg or get played early enough that a young JMU team should have found its footing. The four real “landmine” games — at Old Dominion, at Georgia Southern, at Appalachian State, at Southern Miss — are all winnable but none are gimmes on the road in a rebuilding year.
The Call
This isn’t a JMU team built to run it back to the Playoff — the roster simply isn’t the same group, and pretending otherwise ignores how much walked out the door with Chesney. But it’s also not a team that should be picked to fall out of contention, either. The infrastructure — a Power Four-caliber head coach, a favorable schedule, a genuinely good offensive line, and a defense that lost stars but not depth — gives James Madison a real floor even while the quarterback race and receiving corps figure themselves out in real time.
Prediction: 9-3, a Sun Belt East title defense that comes down to the wire, and no Playoff return. The ceiling gets capped by an offense that has to answer too many questions at once — quarterback, top receivers, and a new play-caller — to be explosive out of the gate. But the schedule is forgiving enough, and the infrastructure strong enough, that “reset year” for James Madison still means competing for a conference championship. Just don’t expect this group to look like the one that beat Troy for the title in December.
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