One office sat empty, its coach fired.
Some 750 miles north, another coach was leaving for Hollywood. But at James Madison, the office never really became vacant.
Welcome to the transition from Bob Chesney to Billy Napier at James Madison, where athletic director Matt Roan pulled off something increasingly rare in modern college football: a coaching search without the circus.
Napier is JMU’s third coach of the decade, during an era in which more than 130 FBS jobs have turned over. Yet few transitions have looked this seamless.
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Consider the alternatives.
Penn State needed more than 50 days to hire Matt Campbell after firing James Franklin.
Florida took 42 days to replace Napier with Tulane’s Jon Sumrall.
LSU’s pursuit of Lane Kiffin after firing Brian Kelly dragged on for five weeks, producing enough drama to fuel the sport’s rumor mill for years.
At James Madison, there was hardly enough time to change the nameplate on the door.
10 days to secure the future
Roan and JMU’s executive team, with CSA’s Drew Turner formally handling the search, wrapped up the process in roughly 10 days.
A phone call. A Zoom. A visit with Napier at his Florida home. Then came Napier’s undercover trip to Harrisonburg to meet with Roan and JMU President Dr. Jim Schmidt in the guts of Bridgeforth Stadium.
By the time Chesney coached James Madison through the Sun Belt championship game and into a first-round College Football Playoff matchup against Oregon, Napier had already been hired and was on hand. Chesney could then turn his full attention to UCLA.
“Before we had the opportunity to ask the question the first time we spoke, (Napier’s) opening statement talked about things learned, the mistakes he felt he made at Florida, the ways he would improve those,” Roan told USA TODAY Sports. “You knew he was going to have opportunities, whether that be to go be an analyst (at a Power Four program) or to go into the NFL, but what I picked up early on, he is a head coach. He wants to run a program, wants to win. When that was made clear and obvious through words and actions, this is a guy who values our position.
“We Zoomed on the day before or after Thanksgiving, we were in his living room five days later and he was here two days after that on campus. Less than 10 days, maybe a week.”
Kevin Warner, a two-decade veteran of JMU athletics who assisted Roan and the university’s leadership with the search, saw something else that stood out about Napier.
“One thing we learned talking to people on his staff, when Florida fired him, they kept his office vacant," Warner said. "I think that’s an indicator of the person he is, the respect for him and who he is as a person.”
A Southwest Virginia native who arrived at James Madison 30 months ago after a successful tenure leading Eastern Kentucky athletics, Roan might have cemented the Napier hire in whirlwind fashion, but the speed was hardly accidental.
Colleagues from across the country have since called Roan wondering how, in the chaotic modern era of college football, JMU managed to conduct a coaching search with the efficiency of a Chick-fil-A drive-thru.
Yet that speed was hardly accidental. It required meticulous foresight, aggressive planning and, above all, a commitment to protecting the ecosystem of success James Madison had built.
Roan called Bryan Maggard, Napier’s former boss and the athletic director at Louisiana.
He called perhaps his closest confidant in the industry, Georgia athletic director Josh Brooks.
Warner made calls, too. Support staffers. Communications directors. People who had worked alongside Napier and knew what operated behind the public-facing image.
The reviews were glowing, both of Napier the coach and Napier the person.
But one endorsement stuck with Roan more than the others. It came from a coach whose résumé includes working with Napier at Florida, learning under Nick Saban and spending time on Jedd Fisch’s staff at Washington.
“Our defensive coordinator, Robert Bala, was Billy’s linebackers coach (and co-defensive coordinator) last year at Florida,” said Roan, a former college football standout at Southern Utah. “I talked to him and said we’re really interested in Billy. And his answer was if I could work for one person the rest of my career, it would be Billy Napier.”
Ecosystem of success
Napier inherited a program that, by almost any measure, should have been vulnerable.
Another coaching change. Another roster overhaul. Another offseason spent trying to preserve what James Madison had built while so many of the people responsible for building it moved on.
And yet, seven games into the Napier era, nothing has broken.
The Dukes are 7-0, still winning at a clip reserved for college football addresses such as Columbus, Ohio and Athens, Georgia.
“This is the first time in my career where I’ve inherited a positive culture,” Napier previously told USA TODAY Sports’ Matt Hayes, “confidence among players and alignment top to bottom.”
Maybe that is the remarkable part of what has happened in Harrisonburg.
The coaches have changed. The players have changed. The winning hasn’t.
Napier is James Madison’s third head coach since 2023. Somehow, across all that upheaval, the Dukes are 39-8, with two bowl bids, a Sun Belt Conference championship and a watershed 2025 College Football Playoff appearance.
And this isn’t some veteran roster Napier simply inherited, pointed toward the field and allowed to run itself.
His first JMU team features 63 new players.
They came from everywhere: the high school ranks, Division II programs and Power conference programs such as North Carolina, Wisconsin and LSU. Different backgrounds. Different levels of college football. Different reasons for ending up in Harrisonburg.
Yet seven games into Napier’s tenure, they have produced the same result James Madison has come to expect.
Winning.
James Madison staying power
Before Chesney, there was Curt Cignetti, who took 13 players with him from JMU to Indiana and turned the losingest program in Division I history into national champions. The Hoosiers are 6-1 and a footstep shy of being undefeated. Chesney brought 10 players from JMU to UCLA and has the Bruins at 6-0 in his first season. Both schools are ranked in the US LBM Coaches Poll Top 10.
They left JMU and have hit the ground running, in large part to the culture and success built in Harrisonburg.
The Dukes have a quintet of Cignetti holdovers: Griffin Hart, Mychal McMullin, Jayden Mines, Amar Thomas and Gannon Weathersby.
They know little in terms of coaching stability but plenty about the lived James Madison experience.
“Every day when you come into the facility, practice is gonna go the way the team carries themselves,” said Mines, a fifth-year senior with almost 40 games’ experience at JMU. “And that’s the way the game’s gonna go. So, it’s just a player-led culture here that’s just been instilled by the players each and every year that are still left here.
“And with new guys coming in, you got 63 guys coming in this year, you gotta have that culture instilled every year. You kind of gotta flush wherever they’ve come from and get them onto the standard that we live here every day.”
Which is why Mines points to his first meeting with Napier — in the shared transition following the announcement Chesney would depart for UCLA and Napier would immediately take over at JMU.
The player requested a 1-on-1 in the office of his new coach.
“It helped me a lot to meet with coach Nape when he first got here, just came up and talked to him, talked to him about our culture,” Mines said. “The way we went about the transition the second time, having the new coach around at practice, helped then and helped now in the long run. Coach Napier, if he saw something and he liked it, he could carry it over.
“I just wanted to meet with him 1-on-1, me being an older guy, get across from him, see his philosophies.”
Mines doesn’t label it alignment; Roan cannot think of any other term.
“There were plenty of weeks and months before that [brief search to land Napier], but there’s a lot of places that talk about alignment,” Roan said. “This place manifests alignment. It is put on display every single day. We have a board who believes in the value of athletics. We have a president who appreciates and advances the role of athletics in driving other institutional outcomes. Our coaches, right? I mean, we have 12 head coaches, I believe, that all support one another. That they understand that what is good for one program is good for 17 others. We have a support staff who back our head coaches and our programs every single day.
“We have student-athletes who love to play for JMU, and I think in this day and age, that is something that is incredibly rare.”
Like losing a head coach. And never even hanging a “Help Wanted” sign on the office door to find the next one.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: James Madison football lost another coach. Its winning machine never blinked