
James Madison, in its first year in FBS, is in the AP Top 25 this week, after a 5-0 start that includes a comeback win at Appalachian State.
The hot start, and the national ranking, have Dukes Nation running wild on the socials about how JMU Football is taking over the Commonwealth.
So, it’s time for a few doses of reality there.
The 5-0 start is great, but it doesn’t hurt that the Dukes’ schedule currently ranks 126th among the 131 programs in FBS, according to the ESPN Football Power Index.
Even the remaining schedule, which includes games at Louisville (FPI ranking: 40) and at home with Coastal Carolina (FPI ranking: 77) ranks just 88th.
App State sits at 59th in this week’s FPI, even with its win at Texas A&M last month.
JMU, at 55, is at the moment the best of the Commonwealth. Liberty (5-1) is 66th, UVA (2-4) is 81st, Virginia Tech (2-4) is 98th, and ODU (2-3) is 109th.
The crown for best team in Virginia in 2022 will almost certainly go to either JMU or Liberty, whose remaining schedule includes BYU (FPI ranking: 46), Arkansas (FPI ranking: 50), and Virginia Tech.
If Liberty wins even two of those three, and avoids an upset in its other games, I’d go with the Flames as the best team in Virginia this season, no matter what JMU does the rest of the way, but I’m not sure two out of three against those guys is going to happen.
Even if we end 2022 with JMU at the top of the mountain, there’s the reality of ceiling with respect to the talk about “taking over.”
UVA and Virginia Tech are both going through obvious growing pains with first-year head coaches, but their ceilings are what you’d expect from programs in the Power 5.
UVA has an athletics budget of $100 million-plus, and Tech is just under that threshold.
JMU’s athletics budget for fiscal year 2021 was $52.9 million, and $46.1 million of that came from student activity fees.
(The UVA Athletics budget got $13.2 million from student activity fees in FY 2021; the budget Virginia Tech Athletics got $10.9 million.)
The JMU numbers are a reflection of nothing in terms of donor support, little from media rights.
And the jump to the FBS, in the Sun Belt, isn’t going to be a help there anytime soon.
The Sun Belt probably should be making more from its media rights, but in FY 2021, it brought in $29 million total as a conference, a little more than $2 million per school per year.
ACC programs are pleading poverty because each school gets in the range of $35 million a year from its rights deals, barely half what the big boys in the Big Ten and SEC are getting these days.
And as much as I hate to be that guy, I guess I have to be: money is everything in college athletics, particularly college football.
If you have it, it doesn’t matter if your teams aren’t doing well; you have the money to buy out an underperforming coach and hire a new one, and in the meantime build $80 million football ops centers, to wine and dine recruits and their families, to line up NIL deals for your student-athletes.
And if you don’t have it, it doesn’t matter if your team is doing well; the big boys can always snatch away the coach who got you there if they want, your conference is only going to get a relative few more dollars in its next media-rights deal, and selling out your 25,000-seat stadium isn’t going to make up the difference.
The one out here for the JMUs of the world is if they can play their way into the soon-to-be-expanded College Football Playoff, which is bumping up to 12 teams as early as 2024, and guarantees a spot to the six highest-rated conference champs and six at-large teams.
Looking at the computers, JMU would be nowhere near the CFP in 2022, and unfortunately looking at future schedules, may not be in the near future, either, but if AD Jeff Bourne can work on beefing up the non-conference schedule, who knows?
A playoff bid would bring in beaucoups of bucks for JMU Athletics, and could sort of pay it forward to allow for a foundation to build from for future success.
In the meantime, fair or not, JMU is going to have to be content with being competitive in the Sun Belt, getting a bid to a lower-tier bowl as the reward to a good season, and stealing wins at UVA (which hosts the Dukes next September) and Virginia Tech (which hosts JMU in 2025) when the opportunity arises.
But as far as taking over football in the Commonwealth, no, it’s not going to happen, because the world isn’t set up to allow that to happen.