Cumberlands finished 4-6 last season. Cumberlands also outscored its opponents by twenty points, outgained them by 769 yards, and held the football nearly eight minutes longer per game. Both of those sentences are true, and the space between them is what this season is about.
The Story So Far
The 2025 Patriots opened 3-1 and never found solid ground again. They hammered Union Commonwealth 45-11 on the road, buried Bluefield 66-12 at home, and won at Warner. Then the Mid-South schedule arrived and the season came apart: 1-5 in conference play, with the only win a 34-10 handling of Bethel.
The splits are stark. In non-conference games, Cumberlands scored 37.5 points a game and allowed 19.8. In conference games, they scored 30.2 and allowed 38.7. The offense dropped seven points a game against better competition. The defense gave up nineteen more.
The Record Lied
Pythagorean expectation estimates how many games a team should have won based on points scored and allowed. At 331 for and 311 against, it puts Cumberlands at 5.4 wins. They won four.
That gap has a name, and it is eleven points.
Faulkner won 36-35. Cumberland took an overtime game 40-37. Georgetown won 28-35. Three Saturdays, eleven total points, and the difference between 4-6 and 7-3. This was not a team that got beaten up over ten weeks. It was a team that got beaten twice, badly, and then lost a coin flip three times.
What Comes Back
Almost the entire offense.
- 99% of the passing yards
- 93% of the rushing yards
- 77% of the receiving yards
- 39 of the team’s 46 touchdowns
For a program coming off a losing season, that is not a rebuild. That is the same offense with another year on it.
The Engine: Drew Gregg
Drew Gregg returns for a graduate season after throwing for 2,425 yards and 27 touchdowns with a 141.7 efficiency rating. The East Tennessee State transfer completed 61 percent of his passes and added 95 carries and three rushing scores, which makes him the rare quarterback at this level who can hurt a defense that plays the run honestly and one that does not.
The eleven interceptions are the number to fix. Opponents returned them 225 yards and turned three into touchdowns. Cut that in half and the eleven points from last season take care of themselves.
The Rest of the Core
Gregg is not doing it alone. Juan Bullard Jr. is back for his senior year after 518 rushing yards at 6.2 a carry, 208 receiving yards, and eight total touchdowns, the most on the team. Jayden Clayton returns after 473 yards at the identical 6.2 clip. Cale Cartwright averaged 7.6 yards a carry in limited work. Every rushing touchdown the Patriots scored last season returns.
Michael Petty is the one to watch. He led the team with 641 receiving yards on 35 catches, an 18.3-yard average with seven touchdowns, and he did it as a freshman. Cade Lamb, Maddux McKinney, Ronye Watson, Jalavis Wilson, Carter Stewart, Skylar Adams, and Eli Davis all come back with him. Watson doubles as the best return man on the roster, averaging 16.2 yards per punt return.
Note the numbers before Thursday: Petty moves from 12 to 6, Tanner Marsh from 15 to 3, Watson from 17 to 7, Jaquon Hall from 94 to 10, Stewart from 80 to 15.
What’s Actually Gone
Here is where the preview stops being a victory lap.
Hunter Zirkle is not on the 2026 roster, and no single departure on this team matters more. He had 10.0 sacks, which was 38.5 percent of everything the defense produced. He had 16.0 tackles for loss out of 56. Thirteen quarterback hurries out of 29. Five forced fumbles out of seven. Two blocked kicks out of five.
One player generated nearly four in ten of this defense’s sacks and seven in ten of its forced fumbles. There is nobody on the roster who has done anything close to it.
He is not alone. Jeremy Hamilton took 52 tackles and three interceptions with him. Ethan Jackson took 38 more. Add it up and the defense returns 47 percent of its tackles, 36 percent of its tackles for loss, and 35 percent of its pass rush.
On offense, the loss is narrower but real. DK Edwards caught 32 balls for 455 yards and six touchdowns. He accounts for the entire gap between 100 percent and 77 percent of the returning receiving production.
And then there is the kicker. Job Matossian scored 51 points, which was 15.4 percent of everything the team put on the scoreboard, went 36 of 37 on extra points, and handled 39 of the 41 punts. In a season decided by eleven points, losing the entire kicking operation is not a footnote.
The Defense Had No Middle Gear
Look at what opponents scored last season, sorted: 10, 11, 12, 14, 35, 36, 40, 42, 49, 62.
Not one opponent scored between 15 and 34 points all year. Four games under fifteen. Six games over thirty-five. Nothing in between, ever. That is not a defense with a level it plays at. It either suffocated you or got run off the field.
The reason shows up in the red zone. Opponents reached the Cumberlands twenty-yard line only 2.5 times a game, which is genuinely good. Yet they scored 42 touchdowns. Twenty-four of those 42 came from outside the red zone. Opponents were not driving on this defense. They were hitting it over the top: an 84-yard run, an 80-yard pass, a 94-yard kickoff return, three interception returns for scores.
Third down defense held opponents to 29.3 percent, which is excellent. Fourth down defense allowed 7 of 14. Both fit the same pattern. This unit could win a normal down. It could not survive a broken play.
One more thing, and it is the most uncomfortable number in this preview. Cumberlands outscored opponents by 44 in the second quarter and 36 in the fourth. They were outscored by 40 in the third, averaging 5.2 points out of halftime against 9.2 allowed. Whatever this team walked into the second half with, it worked better after it got punched.
The Reload
The 2026 roster carries 100 players, and 48 of them are freshmen. Only 37 are juniors, seniors, or graduates. The pipeline runs down I-75 and into north Georgia: 37 from Tennessee, 26 from Georgia, 15 from Kentucky, with Corbin High School alone sending four.
The transfer additions carry weight. Major Newman came from West Point, Eli Davis from Chattanooga, Victor Edwards from Eastern Kentucky, Jake Bates from Ball State, Kantrel Smith from Morehouse, Gregg and Skylar Adams from East Tennessee State.
And the staff clearly knows the kicking situation is a problem, because there are now five specialists on the roster: Sawyer Ford, Cole Ruehling, Khalil Arman, freshman Calum Williams, and Jack Atkinson, a junior punter from Melbourne by way of RMIT University.
The Slate Ahead
Ten games, five at home and five on the road, with open weeks on October 3 and November 7. Faulkner drops off the schedule. Rio Grande is new and is the only genuine unknown on the board.
The detail worth circling: every 2025 rematch flips venue. Union Commonwealth, Bluefield, and Warner were beaten by a combined 138-37 last season and all three come back around. More importantly, three of the five conference losses return to Williamsburg. Campbellsville comes here October 10. Cumberland comes here October 24, a home rematch of that overtime loss. Lindsey Wilson closes the season here November 14.
The two hardest asks are unchanged. Keiser handed Cumberlands its worst non-conference showing of 2025 and the return trip is to West Palm Beach on September 26. Lindsey Wilson won 62-13 and gets the finale.
Our Take
This is a top-heavy offense attached to a defense that has to reinvent its pass rush and a kicking game starting from zero.
But be honest about what 4-6 actually was. That team outscored its opponents. It returns 85 percent of its touchdowns, its starting quarterback, its entire backfield, its leading receiver, and its best return man. Ten of its eleven losses’ worth of margin came down to eleven points and two afternoons where it did not show up.
The ceiling depends on one thing, and it is not on offense. Somebody has to become the guy who wins one-on-one on the edge. If that player exists on this roster, the “no scores between 15 and 34” pattern breaks in the right direction and this is a seven-win team. If he does not, opponents keep hitting the same explosive plays and the same six games get away.
September should be 3-1 or better. Bethel is winnable on the road. Two of the three home conference rematches is a fair ask for a team that already outplayed Cumberland once.
Call it 6-4, and understand that the number is really about whether the defense finds a disruptor by October.
Thursday night, 7 PM, James H. Taylor II Stadium. The answers start immediately.
Win-loss projection and the opinions in “Our Take” are this publication’s own, not a UC or conference forecast. Statistics via the 2025 University of the Cumberlands overall statistics report (Nov. 10, 2025), the 2026 Patriots football roster, and the 2026 schedule. The 2025 report contains duplicated defensive rows for Deandre Williams, Jonathan Heralus, and D’Lante Overstreet, so official team totals of 613 tackles, 56.0 tackles for loss, and 26.0 sacks are used throughout. Returning-production figures match 2025 statistical names against the published 2026 roster and may shift with late additions.