What to know about potential Penn State head coaching candidate Bob Chesney
Penn State is near the end of its head coaching search, and the candidates are coming into focus.
The Nittany Lions and athletic director Pat Kraft will be looking for a candidate that can lead the football program to a national title for the first time in nearly 40 years, and James Madison’s Bob Chesney has his team at 10-1 this season with an outside chance of making the College Football Playoff.
James Franklin, who was fired on Oct. 12, failed to achieve those title aspirations and led the team to the College Football Playoff only once. This season’s team, which is now 5-6 with its two Big Ten wins coming under interim head coach Terry Smith, was supposed to contend for a title and entered the year as the No. 2 team in the AP top 25. Instead, it will need a win in its regular season finale just to qualify for a bowl.
Despite that, Franklin had plenty of success in his tenure and will be difficult to replace. So who will do it? We’re taking a look at the potential candidates throughout the process, with Chesney up next.
Success at every level
It’s not often you see a head coach rise up the ranks as linearly as Chesney has. He went from Division III head coach to Div. II head coach to FCS head coach to FBS head coach — and found success at every level. Chesney began that journey with Div. III Salve Regina where he went 23-9 from 2010-2012 before taking the lead job at Div. II Assumption. He went 44-16 from 2013-2017 there with three playoff appearances before taking the job at FCS Holy Cross in 2018.
He went 44-21 in his six seasons there, finishing first or second every year in the Patriot League and making the playoffs four times before leaving for James Madison. Now in Year 2 with the Dukes, Chesney is 19-5 with a 10-1 record and outside chance of making the College Football Playoff.
Lack of Power Four experience
The biggest detraction to Chesney is that he hasn’t coached at the Power Four level before. That’s not just as a head coach either — he’s never worked for a Power Four program, and the world of college athletics is changing enough that it could be a massive leap for him. The good news is James Madison is a big enough Group of Six program that he has already had to deal with some of the same financial issues related to revenue sharing and NIL, along with roster management in the transfer portal era.
Chesney has taken a high-level Group of Six team to the brink of the playoff in two years, right after former JMU head coach Curt Cignetti took a large portion of the team’s talent with him to Indiana. That doesn’t guarantee that Chesney would have success with the portal, NIL and revenue-sharing allocation at Penn State, but he’s also not completely unaware of those issues.
Leading a balanced team
There’s reasonable skepticism around Chesney, but there’s no doubting how quickly he has turned the Dukes into a very good team on both sides of the ball. James Madison is the No. 26 team in the country according to ESPN analyst Bill Connelly’s SP+,a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency. That puts it behind only North Texas among Group of Six teams, with an important distinction between the two.
The Mean Green are No. 18 in the country on the back of the No. 1 offense with the No. 71 defense, while the Dukes are No. 36 on offense and No. 26 on defense. They’re the highest-level well-balanced team in the country and are capable of winning on the back of a stellar defensive performance or by using an offense that lights up the scoreboard.
