AD Bourne Wants To Keep Houston's Staff Intact
HARRISONBURG — James Madison athletic director Jeff Bourne said the school is ready to do whatever it can to keep its football coaching staff intact after it led the Dukes to the second national championship in program history.
Under first-year coach Mike Houston and his team of assistants, Madison captured not only a national title, but also an outright Colonial Athletic Association championship and picked up a program-record 14 wins.
Houston was named the American Football Coaches Association’s FCS National Coach of the Year and the CAA’s Coach of the Year.
“Anytime your program achieves the pinnacle of success, your staff and coaches are all persons of interest,” Bourne said. “Every program in America is trying to figure out who they need to hire at what level in order to achieve those type of results.
“I’m sure the vast majority of Mike’s staff will have opportunities.”
Offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Donnie Kirkpatrick, who has been a head coach at the FCS level and an assistant at the FBS level prior to his first year at JMU, orchestrated the nation’s second-best scoring offense. The Dukes averaged 46.7 points per game and quarterback Bryan Schor led the country with a 73-percent completion rate.
Defensive coordinator Bob Trott helped Houston turn around a defense that featured the same players that struggled as a unit in 2015. Madison led the country in interceptions and held the nation’s top scoring offense, Sam Houston State to only 7 points in the quarterfinal victory.
Ex-Virginia Tech assistant Bryan Stinespring was the run-game coordinator and tight ends coach for JMU. He and five others — Byron Thweatt (inside linebackers), Jeff Hanson (defensive line), Tripp Weaver (cornerbacks), De’Rail Sims (running backs) and Drew Dudzik (wide receivers) — finished their first seasons at the school while Jamal Powell (offensive line) and John Bowers (special teams/outside linebackers) were successful as holdovers from the previous staff.
Houston’s contract at a $300,000 annual base salary runs through Jan. 31, 2021 and Trott’s $130,000-a-year deal takes him through Jan. 31, 2019. The rest of the staff have contracts that expire at the end of the month, so JMU would have to renew their deals or come to new terms with the eight other assistants to keep Houston’s original staff together.
“Mike’s staff will have opportunities,” Bourne said. “They have to decide if that’s the right opportunity for them in light of what we have to do to keep them here.
“We have something very special here. We have a great team coming back next year and feel great about the program overall, especially when you compare it to other schools that struggle to get fans to games and don’t have the average crowd attendance we do. I think it paints a strong picture of if this is a place that you’d want to give up. We’ll do everything we can to make sure we keep the staff, but I’m sure that there will be those challenges when the large programs come knocking.”