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Can Ashton Jeanty Break Barry Sanders’ Rushing Record?
The Boise State back is a long way from home, but through nearly half a regular season, he is pacing to give the Oklahoma State legend a scare.
Boise State junior Ashton Jeanty is running circles around the rest of college football.
It would be hard to call him underrated, because he’s a Mountain West running back who is drawing heavy Heisman Trophy buzz and stands an excellent chance of at least being a finalist for the award.
But Jeanty, somehow, is having a better season than that.
To say that he is lapping the field doesn’t do justice to how dominant Jeanty has been. The numbers under the hood are even more frightening than the obscene 1,031 yards he’s collected on 95 carries (a 10.9-yard average) with 16 touchdowns in five weeks.
He’s one of only five players to rush for over 1,000 yards in the first five games of a season, joining Northern Illinois’ Garrett Wolfe (2006), LSU’s Leonard Fournette (2015), Stanford’s Bryce Love (2017) and Buffalo’s Jaret Patterson (2020). But he’s the only one who has done it with 15 rushing touchdowns and less than 100 carries.
Jeanty is nearly halfway to a season unlike anything any college back has ever produced, and the only reason he’s not even more of an outlier is that Boise State has shown mercy to his opponents.
Jeanty doesn’t just get yards. He defies gravity.
Defensive coordinators watch a lot of college football. They know Jeanty is good, and they build their game plans to limit him. Jeanty has faced an eight-man box on just over half his carries, compared to a national average of 37.8%, and he has still posted a double-digit average carry.
Just 39 FBS running backs (minimum 25 carries overall) have seen a heavy box on at least half their runs. They’ve averaged 5.5 yards. Jeanty, despite all the bodies aligned to stop him, averages twice that.
More points of comparison:
- On carries against a “bad box,” with eight defenders or more, Jeanty averages 8.9 yards. The national average for tailbacks on those runs is 3.7 yards. Just five running backs have seen 30-plus carries against eight-man boxes or heavier, and four of them average between 3.4 and 5.6 yards on those carries. Jeanty’s average against a heavy box, however, is 8.9 yards.
- On carries in which the offensive line allows a run disruption – a defender at the point of attack clogging a gap or beating his man, essentially – Jeanty averages 10.7 yards. The national average for running backs on such carries is 2.2 yards. Jeanty is quintupling the typical back in how he performs when a defender blows up a play.
- After contact, Jeanty averages 6.5 yards. The national running back average: 2.1. Among running backs with 50 carries or more, the next best after-contact average is 3.9 yards.
- Jeanty averages 0.43 missed or broken tackles per touch, leading all running backs. The average running back breaks 0.15, just more than a third of what Jeanty eludes.
Meanwhile, Jeanty “only” averages 4.8 yards before contact. That’s 11th in the country among backs who have carried at least 50 times. Jeanty is benefitting from solid blocking by the Boise State offensive line, but he is a one-man stick of dynamite who has made defenses crumble before his 5-foot-9 frame.
This cut-up of select runs from Jeanty’s domination effort against Washington State (26 carries, 259 yards, four touchdowns) is, amazingly, representative of what he does every week:
Time and again, Jeanty meets defenders fairly close to the line of scrimmage. Not just one, but a throng. And time and again, he bounces off them, twists out of their arms, and runs into open green (or blue) turf.
It’s unusual for the eye test to so perfectly match what every number says about a player’s skills. Jeanty’s low center of gravity helps him, but it’s worth noting here that he’s not a bowling ball-style back. He is a listed 215 pounds and lacks the wide frame that one would expect of a running back who physically overwhelms the opponent.
Yet Jeanty uncorks ridiculous power from a small frame.
Jeanty’s place in history might be up to Boise State.
Officially, the FBS single-season rushing record is 2,628 yards. That is what the NCAA credits Barry Sanders for his unprecedented 1988 season at Oklahoma, which I dove into in detail a few years ago.
Sanders’ season is the best in the history of the sport at any position, in my view, and in reality, it’s better than the record books show. Sanders did his work at a time when the NCAA didn’t count bowl game stats toward a player’s totals, but his real rushing record is 2,850 yards on a 7.6-yard average. No player at any level of college or professional football has ever run for that many yards.
Jeanty is a long way from home, but through nearly half a regular season, he is pacing to give Sanders a scare. The Boise State back is averaging 206.2 yards per game, which would leave him at 2,474 over a 12-game regular season. (And 12 is how many games Sanders had to reach 2,850).
But the Broncos are a very good bet to make the Mountain West Championship, and at his current pace over 13 games, Jeanty would clear Sanders’ official mark by posting 2,681 yards. On this pace over 14 games – which Jeanty could get if he doesn’t opt out of Boise’s bowl game – Jeanty would pace to pass Sanders’ true yardage total of 2,850.
There’s also the possibility that Boise claims the Group of Five’s spot in the College Football Playoff, and a 15-game season at this pace would make him the first 3,000-yard rusher ever.
Now. This is all ridiculous, and I will slow down to catch my breath.
Jeanty hasn’t done any of this yet. But for the purposes of his pursuit of history, Jeanty’s numbers so far undersell him. He has sat out the entire second half of two games so far, blowout wins over FCS Portland State and sad-sack Mountain West opponent Utah State. After halftime this season, Jeanty has 33 carries for 374 yards.
Boise State coach Spencer Danielson has been reasonable to give Jeanty breathers wherever he can, but that decision has not helped the cause of toppling Sanders’ record.
Everything in life is a tradeoff, and there’s no guarantee that Jeanty would be as effective over a high-carry load. But so far, the evidence points to Boise State doing Sanders’ record a favor by sitting Jeanty down late in games.
Jeanty’s second-half carry average has been better than his first-half rate, and there’s no reason to think he’s less durable than the 14 backs who have taken more carries this season.
Next: Sundays. But wait a minute.
Despite being really small, Jeanty has become the far-and-away consensus No. 1 running back in the 2025 NFL Draft. And the NFL’s longstanding devaluation of tailbacks notwithstanding, Jeanty has started to get a strong bit of media buzz as a potential first-round pick.
Jeanty is just a junior, but he’s an incredible rarity in college football in 2024: the comfortable best player in the sport at his position, who’s stuck around at a Group of Five program for his entire career.
Boise is far from a regular G5 team, of course, but Jeanty’s presence on the Broncos this season is worth appreciating. There will not be many years when every power-conference head coach is forced to stare at a Boise State running back and wish they could somehow get a ball-carrier like him.
Add that Jeanty’s dominance has a real chance of putting Boise in the playoff in the first year of the 12-team format, and it’s clear that his bonkers rushing totals aren’t the only rare thing about what is happening on the blue turf.
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