Ashton Jeanty is chasing one of college football's most debated records

Whether the Boise State running back can break Barry Sanders' single-season rushing record depends on what you believe the record to be

If you have anything beyond a surface-level interest in college football, you’ve probably heard of Ashton Jeanty by now.

The Boise State running back has been one of the stars of the first half of the 2024 season, putting up cartoonish numbers on the ground for a Boise State team that’s in the top 20 of both major polls and appears well-positioned to earn the automatic Group of Five inclusion into the College Football Playoff.

What for weeks has seemed like a two-horse race between Jeanty and Colorado two-way phenom Travis Hunter doesn’t seem to be nearly as much of one after a shoulder injury kept Hunter out of the second half of each of his team’s past two games. For now, Jeanty appears to be the front-runner for the hallowed award and as much as I regret employing a sentence construction I hate, it doesn’t seem all that close.

This Friday, he’ll be a part of what may end up being the most fascinating and consequential Group of Five game of the season when Boise State travels to Las Vegas for a game against UNLV in which the winner will get a crucial leg up in the race for a Mountain West title and playoff berth. If certain pockets of college football fandom aren’t familiar with Jeanty, they likely will be after Friday, assuming he maintains the kind of production he has in his team’s first six games.

Heisman campaigns are more frequently built around numbers rather than narrative, though Hunter, who holds the rare distinction of playing offense and defense, is an obvious exception. Indeed, the reason Jeanty has captured the attention of so much of the country is because of his rushing statistics, the kind that someone can see and understand how good he is without ever watching him. And if you do happen to watch him, his excellence becomes even more apparent.

Six games into Boise State’s season, Jeanty has rushed for 1,248 yards and 17 touchdowns while averaging 9.9 yards per carry. His raw rushing totals become that much more impressive considering he didn’t play at all in the second half of lopsided wins against Portland State and Utah State, games in which he was averaging 11.5 and 14.3 yards per carry before he was pulled. It’s not as if he’s been beating up on subpar competition, either. In the Broncos’ lone loss of the season, a 37-34 setback on the road against Oregon, Jeanty ran for 192 yards and three touchdowns while averaging 7.7 yards per carry against what’s now the No. 1 team in the country.

Along the way, he has run away from his peers – literally – at the highest level of college football. The closest FBS player to him in rushing yards, Iowa’s Kaleb Johnson, is 213 yards behind him, despite the fact Johnson has played in one more contest and has six more carries. Jeanty’s 208 yards per game are 60 yards more than the next-closest player (which is also Johnson.)

That output has Jeanty chasing history more than his peers. But the finish line he’s trying to reach isn’t as clear cut as it might initially appear.

Barry Sanders’ legendary 1988 season…and the controversy that surrounds it

If Jeanty is able to keep up his current pace, he’ll finish the regular season with 2,496 rushing yards and 34 touchdowns (six games into a 12-game regular season, it’s math that’s easy even for a sports writer.)

That total would put him on the doorstep of one of college football’s most hallowed marks – Barry Sanders’ single-season rushing record of 2,628 yards and 37 touchdowns, both of which have stood for nearly 40 years.

Of course, Jeanty’s journey won’t end with the regular season. Boise State is likely to appear in the Mountain West championship game. A win there would potentially send the Broncos to the playoff, but even if they fall short of those goals, they’ll be in a bowl game of some sort, though there’s a fair question of whether Jeanty, a projected early round 2025 NFL Draft pick, would opt out of that.

At the very least, Jeanty would have one extra opportunity to try to top Sanders’ record.

Sanders didn’t have such a luxury.