Did Saturday prove that Group of 5 champs shouldn’t jump the likes of Notre Dame, BYU, Texas, Vanderbilt, et al, to get spots in the College Football Playoff?
Maybe.
Tulane, the #11 seed, because Virginia couldn’t take care of business in Charlotte two weeks ago, lost 41-10 at #6 seed Ole Miss, which had defeated Tulane 45-10 back in Week 4.
The ‘Hoos beat Duke, they’re the ones in Oxford yesterday at 3:30 p.m. on TNT.
I don’t know that UVA beats Ole Miss, but they’re not losing 41-10 in a game that wasn’t even that close.
JMU, the #12 seed, which got its spot in the College Football Playoff entirely because Virginia lost to Duke on Dec. 6, trailed #5 seed Oregon 34-6 at halftime, and the final score, 51-34, looked better than how the game played because Ducks coach Dan Lanning emptied his bench on defense in the fourth quarter with the game well in hand.
The sign that the primetime CFP game was more an annoyance to Lanning than anything was how he reacted to his team hanging half a hundred on a playoff opponent.
“The team realizes this is a growth moment for us, an opportunity to continue to improve and get better, but we’re going to have to play better football to be able to reach our goals when it’s all said and done,” Lanning said. “There’s some moments that really showed up, obviously special teams with the blocked kick, blocked punt, there were some big plays there. But to not be able to come out and have the same success in the second half that we had in the first half is certainly disappointing, and I think our players will certainly learn from that.”
On their way out the door
It says a lot that the head coaches of the Group of 5 schools both making their first appearances in the CFP were both coaching their final games at their current jobs.
Jon Sumrall is headed to Florida, as it turns out, to replace Billy Napier, who was 22-23 in parts of four seasons in Gainesville, and is now the head coach at JMU, replacing Bob Chesney, who is on his way to UCLA, which isn’t exactly a plum job, but it is in Power 4, even if at the lowest rung.
Sumrall will have all the resources in the world to try to breathe life back into Gators Football; UCLA would seem to be hoping that Chesney is the next Curt Cignetti, who left JMU two years ago for Indiana, another Big Ten school with no football pedigree, and has led the Hoosiers to back-to-back CFP berths, and the #1 seed in this year’s playoff.
The game of musical chairs seems to leave JMU in a good place; Napier had success at fellow Sun Belt school Louisiana, leading the Ragin’ Cajuns to a 40-12 record in four seasons there, with his 2020 and 2021 teams finishing in the final AP Top 25.
He won’t have the budget at JMU that he had at Florida, certainly, but then, neither will he have the schedule – in addition to the portion involving the Sun Belt, where eight of the 14 schools were ranked 100+ in the ESPN FPI, the Dukes have on their 2026 schedule Liberty, which took a major step back in Year 3 under Jamey Chadwell, limping to an 4-8 finish this year; Virginia Tech, which will be in Year 1 under James Franklin, who is assuming the reins after Brent Pry put up three losing seasons in his four years in Blacksburg; and UConn, which will be in Year 1 under Jason Candle, who is taking over for Jim Mora Jr., who bolted for Colorado State after getting the Huskies to back-to-back nine-win seasons.
Mora, incidentally, is one of the predecessors to Chesney at UCLA who couldn’t win enough in La-La Land; he was 46-30 in six seasons there, and was fired after back-to-back losing seasons in 2016 and 2017.
Saturday wasn’t good for a lot of folks for a lot of reasons
You wanted to see more fight from Tulane, which did pull a major upset of a Power 4 school in a bowl game not that long ago, beating Southern Cal in the 2023 Cotton Bowl, and JMU, a two-time FCS champ whose biggest win since making the transition to FBS in 2022 is either its 2023 come-from-behind win over a Virginia team that finished with a 3-9 record or the 70-50 win in 2024 over a North Carolina team that got its coach, Mack Brown, fired.
Neither of the Big Boys vs. Cinderella games yesterday was competitive – Ole Miss led 17-3 at the half and 41-3 in the fourth quarter before the Green Wave scored in garbage time; Oregon led 34-3 late in the first half, and 48-13 with the ball inside the 10 late in the third before Lanning’s team gave him some things to yell at them over in the fourth quarter.
The JMU side talked up how it didn’t quit, and in the process, made the score – and the statsheet – look more like it was a game, but inside the box score, Lanning had his Oregon defensive coordinator Tosh Lupoi sub liberally on the defensive side in the fourth quarter, getting reps for 29 guys, and double-digit reps for 24, on the night; for reference, in Oregon’s six one- or two-score games this season coming in, Lupoi used an average of 16 guys for double-digit reps, and an average of 23 guys overall.
“Ultimately, I think the game was at hand. It was just a matter of, how do you finish and perform?” Lanning said. “That’s some good experience for some guys that are in there to be able take advantage of. I just don’t know that we took advantage of that today.”
Yesterday was not only not a good day for the Group of 5; it wasn’t a good day for those who thought they wanted to see another expansion of the CFP, from 12 to either 16 or even 24.
College football isn’t college basketball, which can offer, with its March Madness, the glimmer of hope that a UMBC or Farleigh Dickinson can pull a 16-1 upset, that a Saint Peter’s can get to an Elite Eight, that a VCU or George Mason can get to a Final Four.
In basketball, you get 15 scholarships, and most coaches play eight, nine, at most 10 guys, and if you can get a Big Three out of that mix, and they all get hot and stay hot for a couple of weeks, you can do something special, no matter what the name is on the front of the uniform.
In football, your two-deep – the first- and second-strings at each of the 11 positions on offense and defense, plus your special-teams guys – is 50 guys.
You need depth on top of that 50 to account for the attrition of injuries during a 12-week regular season.
A JMU, a Tulane, are just not going to have 50+ to be able to compete in December with the 50+ of an Ole Miss, an Oregon, an Ohio State, et cetera.
For that matter, I’m not sold on Virginia getting there, but the money people at Virginia are committing $40 million a year in direct compensation and NIL to at least try.
There are resources at the Power 4 level that will never be there in the Group of 5.
That’s why Jon Sumrall and Bob Chesney – and Curt Cignetti – take the first, best chance they get to move up from the Group of 5 to the Power 4.
Rules of the game
Not to cast aspersions on either Tulane or JMU; the rules of the game in place for now worked to their advantage, and they took advantage.
“I mean, look, we’re our conference champion and the rules are what they were, and I think there should be access for at least one G5 team moving forward, I do,” Sumrall said. “I think you should have given the American champion an opportunity before the ACC champion this year, because we beat the ACC champion, Duke won the ACC championship, we beat them.
“I do understand the gripe,” Sumrall said. “By how we played tonight, we maybe didn’t help the critics of that, but I think there should at least be one G5 representative. But I’m not in charge of the playoff. I need to coach whatever team I’m coaching better than what I did tonight. That’s what I’ve got to worry about.”
I foresee a move sooner rather than later to get the playoff to 16, with one spot guaranteed for a Group of 5 champ, the other bids going to the Power 4 champs, who, most years, will be in the Top 16 of the final CFP Top 25 anyway, and then at-large bids going to whoever is left from that Top 16.
There needs to be a guaranteed spot for a JMU or Tulane going forward; just, maybe not both.
This year was an anomaly with Duke getting into the ACC Championship Game because of a poorly devised tiebreaker, then upsetting a Virginia team that was 7-1 in conference play in large part because it had a favorable conference schedule.
The ACC will fix that, or else.
JMU isn’t in the game without that perfect storm, but how things played out is not their fault.
“When you look at the Power 4 teams and whatever, the destiny is really, the ball is in your court. You control your own destiny,” said Alonza Barnett III, the JMU quarterback, who passed for 273 yards and two TDs last night.
“Most of those teams that didn’t make it, they controlled their own destiny, 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,” Barnett said.
And at the end of the day, it’s not like college athletics isn’t all about getting exposure.
What, you thought they went to all the trouble to fund football just to win games?
“When you just look and see, every single day, you see JMU across the TV for the past however long, I can’t imagine what that’s going to do to have us in the national conversation, period,” said Chesney, curious word choice there – us, given that he’s now one of them.
“It’s a free advertisement for the school all over the place, and I just think that our guys, to be able to know that they were the ones to put us in this spot, I think it’s a proud community, if you’ve never been. It’s a proud community that loves their football team and supports the heck out of it, and every single home game is sold out, probably similar to this,” Chesney said.
Fact check: the Sun Belt title game, played on campus at JMU, not a sellout, not close.
“I think to be in this conversation, to see it on the national screen, on national TV every single day for the past two weeks, is pretty special,” Chesney said, as he rode off into the sunset.