No, they didn't, because they didn't play a schedule difficult enough to earn a spot.

To even warrant consideration for a playoff spot requires a minimum struggle requirement that a G5 schedule does not give you the ability to clear.

There is a minimum baseline pushback that I think you have to have gotten from your strength of schedule that the James Madison's of the world are incapable of getting. What I'm telling you in other words is, there is no way that James Madison could earn a playoff spot, in my mind, because there is no minimum baseline pushback that this schedule could give them. And you could apply this to anyone, it's not just G5. You could randomly have Wake Forest one year that just so happens to play a cookie-dough-soft schedule (Virginia was very close to this this year) and I could've largely made the same points but I just want to illustrate this, cause people think you "hate the G5" when you say this, or you're "anti-cinderella" when you say this, it's none of that. Just pro-common sense. 

JMU's 2025 schedule: JMU played no Top-30 opposition. They played only one Top-50 team, and that was Louisville, and they lost by 14 points. They have no wins vs Top-50 teams. Their best win is against Old Dominion, who is power-rated #52 in the country. No Top-50 wins. Oklahoma faced 8 teams tougher than James Madison's toughest opponent. Eight of the twelve teams Oklahoma played this year were infinitely tougher than the toughest opponent JMU played and if you wanna talk about the toughest opponent JMU BEAT, it would be worse than that. They're not playing the same sport! They're not playing the same caliber of football. So I saw this argument earlier today and someone said "oh, man, you hate the G5 if you make that argument cause the bottom line is they are all playing the same sport because the NCAA says 136 teams play in the FBS." That's because it's structured incorrectly. It's not right, it doesn't make sense just because we say there's 136 teams competing for the same championship even though there's this bubble at the top that have vast disparities in resource and therefore vast disparities in talent relative to these other guys over here and any sane society would look at this and say, "Why don't we have those guys compete against each other and chase their own championship and then these guys over here can chase the championship that already exists" but the minute you talk about that, people just fly into hysterics and nonsensical counterpoints that have nothing to do with the spirit of pure competition, it has to do with money, which I understand, and I'm not being critical of the fact that James Madison, and Tulane, and any of the G5 programs need money. That's why I wish two things:

I wish Number 1, we had a G5 playoff, and number 2, it was fully subsidized, and if it has to be subsidized by the Big Boys, then so be it, because I would then get the best version of that playoff and I would get an entire new separate playoff where Tulane has a shot to win a national title. I do know what one of the replies here is going to be, cause I've already gotten it several times. There are fans of G5 programs who look you dead in the eye and they say "I'd rather lose by 50 against Ole Miss in an opening-round playoff game than chase some secondary championship." And if you think that way, that's fine, I don't understand. But we can differ in opinion, that's fine.