This man hired Curt Cignetti and Bob Chesney at JMU. Here's why he knew they'd be winners.
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Two of college football’s most unexpected success stories have one very important thing in common: Their head coaches were once hired by the same person.
Curt Cignetti took the losingest program in the history of college football and turned it into a national champion. There’s no need to Google anything; we all know he’s a winner. As is Indiana now.
Bob Chesney just became the first UCLA head coach to start his tenure 5-0 after the Bruins upset then-No. 13 Oregon on the road and burst onto the national scene. UCLA has a legitimate path to the College Football Playoff this season.
And while there are unique aspects of each coach’s story and success in Bloomington and Westwood, there’s no escaping an obvious similarity: Both Cignetti and Chesney coached at James Madison.
Jeff Bourne hired both of them there when he served as JMU’s athletic director. What did he see in these coaches before anyone else? How did one man identify such coaching talent — and what can we learn from him?
To answer these questions, I called up Bourne. He retired in spring 2025 after spending a quarter-century as the Dukes’ athletic director. The entire athletic department experienced great success during Bourne’s tenure, but we’ll focus on the sport of football. During Bourne’s 25-year run, JMU won two FCS national championships and transitioned successfully to the FBS level. Not only did the Dukes continue their run of football excellence after jumping up a subdivision, they also did it immediately — finishing 8-3 and tied for first place in the Sun Belt East.
And how about Bourne’s final two football hires? Cignetti back in December 2018, and Chesney five years later.
The secret: There was nothing magical about it. Bourne walked me through both hires and why he felt confident each coach would succeed at JMU.
“I don't think there's a genie in the bottle,” Bourne told NBC Sports. “I don't think there's something out there that's the silver bullet. I think it's looking for just individuals with strong skill sets and experience.”
Here’s what Bourne said he looked for when making these hires:
Head coaches, not assistants or coordinators
“I don’t think there’s any replacement for somebody that’s had to be the head coach,” Bourne said. “They’ve had to hire assistant coaches. They've had to fire assistant coaches. They've had to make decisions that, many times, were not popular. They've had to deal with the university administration and athletic administration. They understand what donor pressure is like at the head coach level. There's just the enormity of what they need to have in their toolbox in order to be an effective coach, I think, really hinges a lot of it on having already been there.”
This was especially important after JMU decided to move up to FBS. “I couldn’t afford to take a chance,” Bourne said. He couldn’t risk hiring an assistant coach who might — or might not — be a great head coach. He had to go with someone like Cignetti, who had won big at multiple stops. He knew what he was doing.
Success and a culture that worked at multiple places, in different environments
Bourne knew JMU’s place in the world. The athletic department had big aspirations — it still does — but it would likely need to hire from schools at its level or below it. He noticed Cignetti first when he was coaching at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (from 2011 to 2016).
“We didn't have an endless checkbook, so we had to look at people that we thought that our job would be attractive to, and we pretty much targeted our peers and programs slightly below what we considered our level,” Bourne said. “And he won. He won at a high level. You know where he’d been, where he played, the coaches he’d been around.”
Bourne looked at Cignetti in 2016 but hired Mike Houston, who ended up winning the FCS national championship that season. Cignetti then turned around Elon — taking a team that had gone 2-7 the year before his arrival and reaching the conference championship game (against JMU). “I said to myself then, if we ever have an opening, and he's available, he’s a person we're going to want to talk to,” Bourne said. And, in 2018 when Houston left for East Carolina, that’s what he did. He hired Cignetti.
“Very impressive guy,” Bourne said. “No nonsense. Gets it done, and he’s not in your office every five minutes asking for something.”
The winning continued.
It continued so much that Bourne had to keep an eye out for a replacement again, and he’d seen Chesney from afar, at FCS Holy Cross. There and in Divisions II and III, he was always winning big — and winning conference championships.
“He was putting student-athletes into the pros from Holy Cross — that’s strong,” Bourne said. “Then, once you watch how the team is coached and how the student-athletes play for him, I just thought, here's another individual that's got the tools to be extremely successful.”
So, he hired Chesney.
Great attention to detail, elite teaching ability
Both Cignetti and Chesney were “very, very well-organized coaches,” Bourne said. “Very disciplined — a lot of self-discipline. Discipline in what they expect from their staff.”
Bourne noted that their public personas are quite different — Cignetti is famously brusque, rarely smiling, while Chesney is confident and engaging — they share a lot of similarities in how they identified talent and handled preparation.
“Look at their ability to scout, look at the amount of film that Curt watches and how prepared he was. Same thing with Bob,” Bourne said. “They both knew their staffs exceptionally well. They knew their strengths and weaknesses personally, and they hired around that. Then, they trusted their staff to get the job done. I felt like they were wonderful CEOs of football. They really knew the game. They knew the student-athletes. But beyond that, as head coaches, they knew how to organize and run a program.”
It was important, too, that these coaches knew how to develop players. JMU wouldn’t always be able to get the best recruits, especially once it moved up to FBS and would play rosters with far greater talent than the Dukes had on paper.
“They needed to be coached up to be competitive at the national level,” Bourne said. “So, we looked for a strong background in teaching, someone who related really well to the student-athletes, somebody that shared the university’s mission — a mission of a high degree of integrity. We wanted to find bright, talented coaches who could relate well on a public level and a student-athlete level. … I watched how they treated their coaching staff.
“I'm not sure that — for lack of a better term — a tyrant attitude was going to work well for us. We were looking for somebody that really had a has a good emotional skill set in addition to that deep, rich background in football.”
The understanding that they may not be yours for long
JMU was a step up for both Cignetti and Chesney when they landed there. They chased championships from the jump, and Chesney even took JMU to the College Football Playoff in his final season. Bourne is proud that the JMU administration and donor base made the Dukes an attractive destination that could offer competitive salaries and the necessary resources to help a good coach win big. If a coach had the right foundational skill set, Bourne believed, he could be wildly successful in such an environment.
But wild success also attracts outside interest. Soon, a great coach in the Sun Belt is going to field offers from Power 4 programs. It’s no accident that both Cignetti and Chesney had opportunities to jump straight to the Big Ten, the richest conference in college sports.
It’s both a blessing and a curse for a school like JMU. It identified the right coach at the right time, but it also ended up as a stepping stone — not a final destination.
“It's hard,” Bourne said. “You're working yourself to death each day to make opportunity for them and give them everything that you can so they can be successful, and it's really tough to see them leave. You hate to lose them, but you're happy for what they can do with the opportunities they can be given at that next level.
“For me, I always looked at it as, ‘We'll go back and find the next great coach. We’ve got enough to offer that we're in a good position to be able to attract people of that caliber.’ I took that as a compliment.”
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