JMU championship hero Bryan Schor returns to Harrisonburg as tight ends coach

James Madison brought Bryan Schor back to Harrisonburg with a kind of credibility that cannot be hired off a résumé alone. The quarterback who led the Dukes to the 2016 FCS national championship has returned as tight ends coach for his first season on Billy Napier’s staff, bringing a championship pedigree back to a program that still measures itself by the standard Schor helped set.

Schor’s path back to JMU ran through the Football Bowl Subdivision and beyond football. He spent the past six seasons coaching at the FBS level, most recently at Georgia Southern, where he worked as tight ends coach in 2025 after serving as assistant quarterbacks coach and analyst from 2022 to 2024. Georgia Southern’s tight ends caught 19 passes for 177 yards and a touchdown last season, and the offense produced its first 1,000-yard rusher since 2018. Before that, Schor was an offensive graduate assistant at East Carolina in 2020 and 2021 under his former JMU head coach Mike Houston.

Napier’s arrival gave the reunion added weight. JMU hired Napier as its 10th head football coach on Dec. 6, 2025, on a five-year contract after he went 40-12 in four seasons at Louisiana and then spent four seasons at Florida. Schor now joins a staff shaped by major-college experience, while also carrying the kind of program memory that comes only from having lived through JMU’s highest moment.

That 2016 season remains the defining chapter of Schor’s playing career. He finished his JMU career with school records in passing touchdowns, 62, passing yards, 7,078, completions, 559, and total offense, 8,241. As a junior, he completed 217 of 297 passes for 3,002 yards, 29 touchdowns and six interceptions, then delivered when the stakes were highest, throwing three touchdown passes in the national semifinal against North Dakota State and two more in the title game against Youngstown State. That run earned him HERO Sports FCS second-team All-American honors, the Bill Dudley Award, Colonial Athletic Association Offensive Player of the Year recognition and first-team All-CAA honors.

After his JMU career ended, Schor kept chasing football. He attended rookie minicamp with the Chicago Bears in 2018, signed a one-year deal with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in 2019 and later joined Ottawa. Now he is back where the legend began, a former captain and one of the most decorated quarterbacks in program history, coaching a position group for a team trying to build its next championship run on the same kind of credibility that Schor once delivered on the field.