Barber: How Should JMU’s 2025 Football Season Be Remembered?

EUGENE, Ore. – As he looked back on an historic, championship football season that had just ended across the country, 2,800-miles from Harrisonburg, James Madison senior wide receiver Nick DeGennaro marveled, not just at what his team had accomplished, but how it did it.

"It's crazy to think about January to December," DeGennaro said shortly after the Dukes' 51-34 loss at fifth-seeded Oregon in the first round of the College Football Playoff. "To think about, however many number of guys are new, they come in and you're just working out. You don't even really know each other. You're making friends with people, and you get into the summer and now it's football, and Coach (Dean) Kennedy is saying, 'We're going to go make this playoff.' And you've got to believe it, and you've got to believe it with guys you've never played with."

The Dukes embraced that lofty goal and their belief was the underlying factor behind JMU's masterful navigation of the modern landscape of college football – complete with both a roster overhaul and a pending coaching change.

JMU, which became a full-fledged FBS program in 2024, went undefeated in the Sun Belt Conference, hosted and won the league championship game and finished the year ranked higher than the ACC champion – Duke – to earn a spot in the CFP, becoming the first program from the Commonwealth of Virginia to do that.

The disappointment it felt on Saturday night stemmed largely from the fact that JMU walked away from Autzen Stadium believing it hadn't played its best football.

The Dukes gave up eight plays of 20 yards or more to the explosive Ducks, had a punt blocked and returned for a touchdown, a field goal try blocked and they committed 13 penalties for 113 yards.

"The complementary football we've been playing all year really didn't show up," head coach Bob Chesney said after his final game with the program. "There were spurts on offense, there were moments on defense, there were moments on special teams, and then there was obviously really bad moments on all three sides of the ball. I think we needed to play elite football. We needed to play our best football of the entire year."

The Dukes didn't deliver that level of play. Still, it was hard to watch them in the second half or look at the gaudy offensive statistics they put up and not believe JMU's A-game could have made Saturday night's Duck hunt more competitive.

They outscored Oregon 28-17 in the second half, continuing their trend of outplaying opponents in the third and fourth quarter.

They racked up 509 total yards to go with their 34 points. Both of those totals are the highest the Ducks' defense has allowed this season. It was also the first time a team UO had allowed more than 500 yards inside Autzen Stadium since Washington on Nov. 12, 2022.

Only four other opponents even hit 20 points against Oregon this season and one of those – Penn State – needed overtime to do it.

No team had gone for so much as 400 yards against the Dukes this year.

JMU impressed Oregon star quarterback Dante Moore, who it intercepted twice.

"It's a talented team," Moore said. "They have a great coaching staff, great players. They fought their tails off. They deserve to be one of the 12 teams in there."

Of course, the way the game started – Oregon scoring touchdowns on its first five possessions while the Dukes could only muster a single field goal – created a deficit JMU could never threaten to erase.

Still, even in the immediate aftermath of their defeat, JMU's players grasped just how significant their 2025 accomplishments are.

"A lot of a wave of emotions happening on the field right after the game. It's definitely hard," senior safety and team captain Jacob Thomas said. "But just have to realize that we did something no other JMU team has done. …For us to get to this stage I think it's awesome, and it's something that we earned it. Just wish we had a different result tonight."

Power conference boosters eager to keep more CFP spots – and CFP checks – for their leagues to widen the resource gap, railed against the current playoff configuration, a system that invited two Group of Six teams – JMU and Tulane – into the bracket.

They conveniently ignore the fact that lopsided first-round results aren't the sole domain of the Group of Six entrants.

Last year, ninth-seeded Tennessee lost by 25 to eighth-seeded Ohio State. In fact, all four of last year's first-round games were decided by double digits, as were three of the four quarterfinals.

"Most of those teams that didn't make it, they controlled their own destiny," JMU quarterback Alonza Barnett III said. "And we handled what we could handle, and we didn't give into outside noise. People say this, people say that, he say, she say. At the end of the day, you have to control your own path and own your own path. Some teams didn't do that, and that allowed for us to get in there. We controlled our own path."

It wasn't an easy path.

Perhaps most remarkable about Chesney's two seasons in Harrisonburg – each year really saw him and the Dukes execute rapid rebuilds.

After Curt Cignetti took 13 JMU players with him to Indiana after 2023, Chesney brought in 64 transfers and high school recruits for his first season.

This year's roster included 55 newcomers. That included DeGennaro, who transferred to JMU for his final season after spending 2022-24 at nearby Richmond.

Despite that turnover, the upward trajectory of the Dukes' program remained unbroken.

In 2024, Chesney took that a step further, guiding the Dukes to the program's first-ever bowl win – a Boca Raton Bowl victory over Western Kentucky.

This year wasn't merely the next step in the process, though.

There were 67 teams competing from Group of Six schools this season. Most have been at the FBS level far longer than JMU. Most have never authored a season anywhere near what JMU accomplished in 2025.

That's how this season should be remembered.

"Obviously you don't want it to end like this," senior linebacker and team captain Trent Hendrick. "But I'm not mad that I ended it with the people that I ended it with."

And it's a group that will go down in JMU history.

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