I'm continuing to drop some posts evaluating guys on my radar who could potentially be the next guy for VT. This is my second post. The first was on WKU coach Tyson Helton.
This week: Bob Chensey
Who is Bob Chesney?
Bob Chesney is the 47-year-old head coach at James Madison who just completed his first season in Harrisonburg. The Pennsylvania native has spent his entire coaching career methodically working his way up through the ranks, proving himself at every level from Division III to his current G5 position.
Chesney played defensive back at Dickinson College, then began his coaching career in 2000 as an assistant at Norwich University. He's climbed the coaching ladder, starting as an assistant, then taking on head coaching jobs at D3 Salve Regina (2010-12), D2 Assumption College (2013-17), FCS Holy Cross (2018-23), and now G5 JMU.
His track record of program transformation is remarkable
Chesney has an overall head coaching record of 120-50 (.706 winning percentage) across 15 seasons at four different programs (ignoring JMU's current season - they're currently 2-1 with a 28-14 loss to Louisville). With the exception of JMU, Chesney has made a habit of taking struggling programs and turning them into winners:
- Salve Regina (2010-12): Inherited a program that had eight consecutive losing seasons and immediately posted three straight winning records
- Assumption College (2013-17): Took over a program that had just two winning seasons in the previous 17 years and led them to five straight winning records and three consecutive NCAA Division II playoff appearances
- Holy Cross (2018-23): Built perhaps the most successful era since the 1980s, going 44-21 overall with five Patriot League titles and four straight playoff appearances from 2019-2022
His staff loyalty could be a double-edged sword
Chesney has shown loyalty to his assistants... which as VT fan could make your eye twitch. When he moved to JMU, he brought seven coaches with him from Holy Cross, which sounds familiar to Virginia Tech fans who watched Justin Fuente bring much of his Memphis staff to Blacksburg with (at best) mixed results.
On the flip side, his defensive coordinator at JMU is Lyle Hemphill, who coached at Duke with Mike Elko. That Duke team ranked first in the ACC in scoring defense (stupid metric) despite having just the 25th best defense in SP+ (smarter metric). His offensive coordinator Dean Kennedy followed him from Holy Cross, where Kennedy had developed Walter Payton Award finalist Matthew Sluka.
In the hypothetical scenario where Chensey is Virginia Tech's next football coach, I would hope for more proven staff hires
Chesney is a proven winner
He's won everywhere. His assent appears to be similar to Chris Klimen, Lance Leipold, or Jamey Chadwell. He's won over multiple decades at different levels. He is apparently very "adaptable" (I don't know what this means, but I found at least three articles on him that use the word 'adaptable' to describe him).
At Holy Cross, he won Patriot League Coach of the Year three times (2019, 2021, 2022) and guided the program to its first FCS playoff victory in decades. His teams consistently performed above expectations, including close losses to Boston College and Army that showed they could compete with FBS opponents.
His first JMU season was good, but leaves some questions
Chesney's debut season at JMU presents a fascinating puzzle for evaluating his potential. On one hand, he went 9-4 and led the Dukes to their first-ever bowl victory, defeating Western Kentucky (ironically coached by Tyson Helton, who I previously wrote about) 27-17 in the Boca Raton Bowl (also, bowl victories don't mean what they used to in the aughts, so take this with the appropriate grain of salt). The season included a stunning 70-50 victory at North Carolina that set a Kenan Stadium record for points scored by an opponent (LOLZ). JMU led the nation in turnover margin under Chesney (butttt remember... turnovers are random). They finished the season as the 41st best team per SP+, with the 49th best offense, the 41st best defense, and the 52nd best Special Teams unit.
How much of JMU's success was due to Chesney's success vs what he inherited from Curt Cignetti? Cignetti left JMU for Indiana, he took an extraordinary amount of talent with him - 13 players followed him to Bloomington, including the team's leading tackler (Aiden Fisher), top receiver (Elijah Sarratt), leading rusher (Kaelon Black), and key offensive and defensive linemen. Cignetti mostly gutted the roster of proven talent.
Chensey rebuilt significant portions of the roster through the transfer portal, bringing in players like running backs George Pettaway (from North Carolina) and Ayo Adeyi (from Cincinnati), and still managed to win a bowl game. Rebuilding a team that lost 13 starts and returning to 9 wins ain't bad.
But, as you know if you're reading this, JMU was a G5 powerhouse when he arrived, and has been on an upward trajectory for a solid decade. Virginia Tech is not a one year rebuild with a known trajectory; the Hokies would be asking Chesney to rebuild a struggling program, and guide us through potentially 3-10 years of power conference purgatory.
He's open to NIL world
Chesney has openly acknowledged the realities of today's transfer portal and NIL era - as shown in this interview. I think it's kinda table stakes in 2025 that coaches are bought into the reality of the NIL/Portal, but I'm not sure all coaches are (I definitely question it with some of the more retread-y candidates).
Regional knowledge
While Chesney isn't from Virginia, he's spent significant time recruiting in the Mid-Atlantic region during his Holy Cross tenure. His understanding of Northeast and Mid-Atlantic recruiting pipelines could benefit Virginia Tech, particularly in areas the program has traditionally recruited.
That said, this is one area where questions remain - can he recruit at the ACC level? Can he compete with Clemson and Miami for elite talent? His track record suggests he's good at identifying and developing under-recruited players, but the jump to Power 4 recruiting is significant.
The concerns are real and should be acknowledged
To be candid, I would be underwhelmed with a Chesney hire. He's supposed "known for intricate preparation, intense practices and maximizing talent", and he certainly maximized his talent since arriving at JMU, but due to the complete lack of P4 experience (literally has never been a player, GA, assistant, or head coach at a P4 program), I'd really need to see some elite staffing around him (both front office AND assistants) to get excited about it.
I think he's a pretty good coach, and I do believe that winners win (see Leipold, Klimen, etc). But he hasn't won quite like those guys have - Leipold was running the D3 equivalent of Nick Saban's Alabama before going to University of Buffalo, Klimen won 4 FCS Natties(!!!!) in five seasons at North Dakota State. Chesney won a couple of playoffs games at a historically bad FCS team.
And give that we just don't know how much of JMU's 2024 and 2025 success was built on infrastructure and recruiting momentum from the previous coaching staff versus Chesney's own impact, it's impossible to fully separate his contribution from what he inherited after just 1.25 seasons.
Sports Illustrated (which has been using AI to 'write' articles) recently published a piece saying that Chesney "is around the No. 6 to No. 10 range... when it comes to where he'd sit on the Hokies' big board." We'll see how this season goes, but IMHO he's closer to 10 than 6.
If VT lands with Chesney, it absolutely could work out, but it would also be a sobering sign of how coaches/agents view the Virginia Tech Job.
Comments
fantastic info, as always, bar1990!
also, nice little dig at SI lol
I share your sentiments in that I would be "whelmed" by this hire. I certainly think he could do well, but does he have the skill set to transform our football operations environment to be top of the ACC given the right resources?
Or- because we will have a GM equivalent, is he a better choice because he's a football coach first?
If I had to choose today, I still choose Helton.
That's not enough on it's own IMO. CFB 'GMs' won't handle everything related to recruiting - at least not in 2026... maybe in 5, 10, 15 years, etc, but no org is that mature yet, and I don't think High school coaches/pipelines are ready for that either.
Now if you want to hire Chesney as HC, Luke Fickle at DC, and say Blake Anderson at OC, and pair that with a GM... well you have my attention
Agree that a head coach is likely to continue having recruiting responsibilities even in a GM lead world. Even if you're mostly playing for the paycheck, trusting the coach to be able to develop you and give you opportunities to showcase yourself and win games is still going to be an important factor in a recruit's decision. There could be a eventuality where the head coach doesn't spend as much time on recruiting as the GM regarding player evaluation, but the head coach probably still needs the recruiting ability to convincingly sell the program to recruits to be able to close on the targets identified by the GM, whenever there are competing offers in the same price range.
Would need to see at least two more JMU seasons before thinking about hiring him. He has definitely provided a repeatable pattern of turning the programs around while advancing up the CFB division ranks, but he is not the answer to our problems today.
We amped up our budget big time
We are bringing Bruce Arians in as our OB1
We need to bring on a coach at this level as well.
He's not it today.
Yea, I agree. I decided to knock this out because I think it's a pretty easy 'pass'
But I will warn you (us)...
If 10 other schools increase their funding by the same degree... well, it will be just like when we went from 3rd in the ACC to 7th in 3 weeks with Pry.
I hear you, I really do, but I am of the firm belief that HNW individuals and universities who have already "made the plunge" aren't going to level up in the immediate future.
Why do I say this?.....I believe the insane amount of money has been committed/established. I think it's now more of a sit back and see what results we get from this. I just do not think this level of money will be supported year in and year out long term or even mid-term. The amount of money being thrown around is just ludicrous for kids at the collegiate level. If it goes up with let's say ~ 10 organizations, it will be modest. I think we will see a leveling off over the next 2-5 years.
Now, I could be way, way off, and if I am, then mankind has lost its mind.
Chesney is the one G5 guy I'd be hopeful about. He seems like he's in the Deboer/Leipold winners trajectory. However both Deboer and Leipold had at least one year with a power conference team, Chesney doesn't.
Why would we hire Chesney as an HC? Isn't he some pop country music singer?
I think this is his brother.
Appreciate the write-up! VT could definitely do worse than Chesney but if that's the bar...
My biggest reservation about Chesney is less about him, and more a general rule of caution for me -- when a coach takes over a well-oiled machine. We haven't seen enough to know if he is going to sustain and elevate a program, or win early and decline. We saw the latter happen with Fuente, so we know that story all too well.
I like a winner, I like someone who is familiar with the region, etc. I simply do not know how much of JMU's continued success is the foundation laid before him, and how much is his own coaching and development prowess.
It's the main reason why I keep coming back to Mullen. He's *done it* at a program with some similar issues to VT in Miss State (though he did have the SEC patch on the chest). He's won at Florida, and while he underperformed there as a recruiter, that is an uber-high standard that he would not be expected to meet here. Plus, the portal, NIL and rev share have fundamentally altered the player acquisition, where Mullen's shortcomings as an individual recruiter probably won't always matter as much. To be clear, he isn't even a "bad" recruiter, by any means, he simply isn't known as an elite one.
Fu I think was a very good (not great or elite), but very good pure coach. Far better than Pry. I think the starting talent he inherited from Beamer, plus more urgency and aggression with coaching and scheme, is what led to two really solid years in 2016 and 2017. But as time wore on, you saw the downside of Fu - his inability to recruit at a high level and to manage a roster/develop talent. That is what ultimately did him in IMO. Pry just turned out to be all bark and no bite - he couldn't recruit well enough (raised the floor or depth of the program somewhat, but top end talent was still pretty bad overall) and wasn't a very good coach/game manager either.
Chesney is a gamble because of sample size (like you said don't have enough data points to know if he's just succeeding in a good situation yet) and translation to a P4 program. There's always that degree of risk hiring a G5 coach and whether it will translate to the top levels, but you can at least make an educated guess with a strong sample size of winning/recruiting/development over time. Just not enough there for me on Chesney, it feels like the risk outweighs what upside there may be. It feels like a gamble and that's just simply something we can't do with this hire.
Fuente while better football coach than Pry, Bowen was the only one on staff watching any film since bud left
At this point, I'm taking Arians at his word. Wants someone who is a great coach on the field and has the charisma to get people to donate. Not sure who fits that bill but if they find someone, I think they'll pursue...and I think they'll be willing to pay. Wonder how many USF games Arians will attend this fall?
JMU gave up 4 first-half touchdowns to ODU at home...and won 63-27.
(those 4 include fumbling the opening kickoff (!) for an ODU touchdown, and giving up a 99-yard single-play touchdown after pinning them at the 2)
Yea, I've seen this general comment in a few places. I didn't watch the game so I'm not quite sure what happened.
I'm pretty confident that Chesney can coach a ballgame. I still have no evidence that he can run a P4 program.
Sorry 63-27...I keep forgetting the last one because I couldn't believe it with my own eyes and it was run out the clock time.
even if the next guy can only do 1 of those 2 things he'd be an improvement
Agreed, but there are people (ie; Charles huff) who we have more confidence they can do both.
True. I'd rather have Huff than Chesney
His star is rising for me after the ODU beat down. I'd hate to see another JMU Head Football Coach Factory product leave the state and be wildly successful.
I know Cig is awesome, but...
The idea that JMU is some sort of cradle of coaching is quite misguided. If you want the program that keeps turning out P4 wonderkinds, you should be looking at Western Kentucky (which I talked about in my Tyson Helton piece)