About 10 years ago – long before I ever wrote about college football betting – I accepted a job as sports editor of JMU’s student newspaper, The Breeze.
It was the fall of 2012, and it felt at the time like the biggest thing I had ever done with my young life. I was trading a whole lot of weekend day drinking and Mass Effect 3 multiplayer for the charms of student journalism in a bright, old basement in Anthony-Seeger Hall.
There was no way to foresee all of the incredible things that would happen over the following year. Even by the standards of someone with journalistic access, I feel lucky to have caught some pretty memorable events.
I’m thinking of the men’s soccer team upsetting No. 1 North Carolina in Harrisonburg. Or walking through the unfinished guts of the new Bridgeforth Stadium with athletics staffers during the final weeks of finishing touches.
There was also the saga of watching the men’s basketball team qualify for its first NCAA Tournament since 1994 … only to immediately then watch Rayshawn Goins get arrested and suspended at a party in the swanky 865 complex at the top of the hill on Devon Lane.
As the years have passed, though, I remember one sequence of events with more and more outsized importance.
Here’s a sentence you might not have heard in a while: JMU Football missed the playoffs.
It was the third time in four years that there was no football postseason in Harrisonburg, and national championship-winning coach Mickey Matthews was firmly on the hot seat. (One year later, his contract was not renewed.)
In the season finale, the Dukes (7-3) led new rival Old Dominion (9-1) at halftime, 21-10. I was watching from the press box for a rare night game. It was a win-and-you’re-in playoff situation. Despite the stakes, the game was (annoyingly) not a sellout. School was out for Thanksgiving break. My roommates, for their part, had bought four kegs. Half of the Pi Sigma Epsilon business fraternity was in my Sunchase apartment.
After halftime, ODU quarterback Taylor Heinicke engineered a masterful second-half comeback, tossing four second-half touchdowns and stamping out the Dukes’ playoff embers. Heinicke went on to win the prestigious Dudley Award for the best college football player in the state of Virginia. He also won the Walter Payton Award for the best offensive player in FCS Football.
Eventually, he was pressed into service as the Washington Football Team’s starting quarterback.
Heinicke would be ODU’s only Walter Payton winner. That’s because just a few weeks later, ODU announced it was leaving the CAA and heading for FBS.
A decade later, it’s difficult to describe exactly what that moment felt like. ODU had been a modern Division I program for all of four years; JMU had been one of the most successful programs of the previous 10. Yet ODU was moving up because … I don’t know. Something vague about high school football recruits in the 757?
The aftermath of the 2012 football season didn’t just sting like a missed playoff run. It felt more existential than that. JMU had been the loser in more than just a football game.
Then, like now, college football was in a turbulent period of realignment.
The previous fall, I had walked into my 8 a.m. class with an adjunct professor of sports communication, Kevin Warner, who also happened to be a key member of the JMU athletic department.
He broke some news to me, as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes – the Big East was falling apart.
It was 2011, and Pitt and Syracuse were leaving for the ACC. The fate of my beloved Mountaineers was unknown.
West Virginia eventually found refuge in the Big 12. Which was fine, I guess – any port in a storm, as the saying goes.
But a year later, as realignment trickled down and ODU jumped ship from the CAA, I dreaded that creeping feeling of being left behind once again.
At the time, the CAA was the preeminent conference in college football. (North Dakota State had won merely one of its 14 million consecutive FCS national championships.) If ODU was jumping ship … who was next?
Here in 2022, we all know what happened in the years to follow. App State played its final FCS season the following year, in 2013. So did another storied program, Georgia Southern. Georgia State had played its final CAA season in 2012.
Coastal Carolina was gone in 2016. Liberty was out in 2017.
And JMU was definitely flirting. Sun Belt rumors were flying throughout my final weeks with The Breeze during the spring of 2013. I wrote a semi-cringey column about it – 90 percent of the stuff that I wrote when I was 22 is probably cringey, if we’re all being honest – where I hemmed and hawed about the tradeoffs of big boy football in a mostly irrelevant, nonsensical conference.
One thing I did get right at the time, I think – JMU never belonged in a conference with Idaho or New Mexico State.
Another bit that aged well: “at some point in the near future, JMU athletics must land somewhere or at least drastically shift the perception of the CAA as a dying brand by adding strong (see: not the College of Charleston) members to the conference.”
I genuinely can’t believe it took another 8.5 years after I wrote that column for JMU to announce a move. And it was a long 8.5 years. Think of everything that happened between then and now! The Withers disappointments; the joys of College GameDay; six seasons of Fargo frenemy status; the bizarre week of Mike Houston’s departure; the 2021 spring season; I could go on.
And that’s just football! I haven’t even mentioned the men’s soccer run, or Kenny & Sean’s good work in women’s basketball, or a dump truck of softball accomplishments, or a national championship for lacrosse.
But now, on the precipice of JMU’s first football game as an FBS program, it feels like the Dukes and their fans are exactly where they’re supposed to be.
Despite a decade of realignment anxiety, the threads all pulled together perfectly for JMU when they absolutely had to.
The nature of realignment is that most teams are losers. When we concentrate more money and power into fewer and fewer groups, the proportion of relative losers keeps growing.
Somehow, little ol’ James Madison University became one of the rare winners in all of this.
That’s something to be grateful for, just a few hours away from the first of many FBS games.
Welcome to the Sun Belt, JMU. The FBS journey starts on Saturday.
