Ashton Jeanty’s Long Run to College Football Stardom
From Italy to Idaho, Jeanty’s career has been forged by patience and persistence. His powerful, explosive running made him a Heisman Trophy contender.Ashton Jeanty’s Long Run to College Football Stardom
From Italy to Idaho, Jeanty’s career has been forged by patience and persistence. His powerful, explosive running made him a Heisman Trophy contender.
For miles and miles, Ashton Jeanty peered out the window of the team bus, watching the European countryside float past him. It was 2018, and Jeanty was a ninth grader on the Naples Middle/High School Wildcats football team, traveling with his teammates from their small Italian farmland town of Gricignano Di Aversa, on the outskirts of Naples, to play a game in Spangdahlem, Germany.
This particular bus trip would take 18 hours—one way. But for Jeanty, who had moved to Italy with his family two years earlier, it was thrilling to pass through Austria, Switzerland, France, and so many unfamiliar places, where a kaleidoscope of cultures awaited him. “You’re blessed,” Jeanty’s mother, Pamela, would tell him. “Some adults save their whole lives to get to see Europe.”
The Wildcats team was made up of international students and American teenagers like Jeanty, the children of military families who lived near the U.S. Naval Support Activity Naples base, and they mostly competed against other American military schools. They flew to Spain to play, and once, on a football trip to Belgium, they had to walk an hour to meet their bus because a marathon in Brussels had closed streets and snarled traffic near the airport.
Jeanty still managed to impress in that game—rushing for more than 300 yards and scoring five touchdowns—and some of the Belgian parents asked him to take pictures with them afterward. “You’re going to be famous one day,” they told him.
Jeanty’s been on a journey unlike that of any player in college football. It's taken him from his birthplace in Jacksonville, Florida, to Virginia and from the Italian countryside to the Dallas suburbs to Boise, Idaho. He’s constantly had to start anew and then been asked to wait his turn. Each move has required him to be patient and persistent.
Now he’s leading college football in rushing yards and touchdowns, and his Boise State team is on the verge of a berth in the 12-team College Football Playoff. He’s expected to be a finalist for the Heisman Trophy and is likely to be a first-round pick in next year’s NFL draft.
He’s one of the most exciting players in the entire sport, an offensive juggernaut who runs past, through, and over defenders—even though he’s just 5-foot-9—and often, that’s after he’s run the ball some 30 or 40 yards on the same drive. Sometimes he’s even hurdling over them with the ease of a child playing hopscotch.
“I believe he’s the best football player in the country,” says Spencer Danielson, Boise State’s head coach.
Yet Jeanty played defense for some of his high school career after his family returned to the States and settled in Frisco, Texas, in 2019. He didn’t even become a full-time starter at running back until his senior year. And despite his natural talent, explosiveness, and sheer power on the field, a distinctive blend of skills he honed from years of playing hoops, ESPN ranked him as just a three-star recruit coming out of high school. There was little running back film on him, and the COVID-19 pandemic hitting during his sophomore year of high school limited his opportunities.
“I’ve had to earn every single thing, from a spot on the field, to offers, to whatever it may be,” Jeanty says. “I came in from overseas. Nobody knew who I was. Nobody knew how good I was potentially.”
Years of moving, adapting, and making home wherever he happened to be instilled in him a work ethic that never allowed him to feel fully comfortable. And he’s still hustling as if he’s the kid in Italy fighting for a chance to be seen by college coaches.
In an era of football when running backs aren’t nearly as valued as they used to be, Jeanty bucks the trend. He averages about 25 carries a game—his 312 carries are about 20 more than any other player in the Football Bowl Subdivision—and prides himself on being what he calls a “workhorse” for Boise State’s offense. He doesn’t avoid big hits or try to sidestep contact. And he is constantly getting hit and plays through injury.
“He takes a beating, but he delivers one, too,” says James Montgomery, Boise State’s running backs coach.
Strong doesn’t even properly describe Jeanty’s Herculean, how-is-he-doing-that kind of strength. Before his sophomore year of college, he squatted 575 pounds. Montgomery thought that Jeanty had maxed out. He was wrong. Now Jeanty easily squats 605 pounds “like a hot knife through butter,” Montgomery says. His other maxes are as astonishing: a 340-pound power clean and a 350-pound bench press. His core strength and his low center of gravity allow him to explode and break tackles. Jeanty has 2,288 yards and an FBS-leading 28 touchdowns this season. He’s currently 340 yards shy of Barry Sanders’s single-season record. He has more yards after contact than any other FBS player has total rushing yards. His 123 missed tackles forced is more than any FBS running back has had in a season since 2014, when Pro Football Focus began tracking college football.
“He wants to punish you,” says Jim Davis, his former coach at Naples High in Italy. “He’s looking at it as ‘All 11 of you are trying to get me. Well, I’m going to get you before you get me.’”
There are times when all 11 players on defense have had a shot to tackle him, and they simply can’t. These jaw-dropping runs have happened over and over and over again this season:
“From the fourth quarter to the first quarter, you’ll never see a difference in how explosive and how violent he plays the game,” Danielson says. “That’s a testament to him wearing people down and him not getting worn down himself.”
Jeanty’s father said his son admires Saints running back Alvin Kamara, and you can see the influence in the way Jeanty eludes defenders in open space and excels at both rushing and catching. He’s had many explosive runs, such as his 70-yard fourth-quarter touchdown against Oregon. And against Utah State, he took his first carry all the way to the house. He put up video-game-like stats in a win over Washington State, running for 259 yards and four touchdowns, including a 64-yard rush; breaking four tackles on the first drive of the game; and breaking off a 59-yard run in the third quarter, when he eluded three tackles before escaping one more on the goal line to score.
“I haven’t seen anything like that,” Montgomery says. “We’re watching the tape, and I’m just like, ‘Man, you better call your parents and thank them,’ because there’s no drill, there’s nothing that I could have done and been able to make him make some of those runs and break those tackles. It goes back to his mentality. He just doesn’t want to be denied.”
Indeed, while many praise Jeanty’s physicality, he takes pride in his mental toughness, which helps him withstand contact game after game. “Every player that’s recruited to Division I football because of their athleticness at the position, they check the boxes,” Jeanty says, “whether it be speed, agility as a running back, making the cuts, making the physical runs. … The mental game is different now because when guys are tired in the third and fourth quarter, I’m still going 100 percent. And quite frankly, I’m just getting started.”
If Jeanty wins the Heisman on December 14, he’d be the first player from a non–power conference to win the award since 1990, when BYU quarterback Ty Detmer took home the honor. A running back hasn’t won college football’s top individual award since Derrick Henry in 2015. But Jeanty isn’t driven by awards. “I think if you’re motivated by awards, it’s not good. Because if you don’t get those awards, then what’s going to be your motivation after that when you don’t get it—to go chase another award that you might not get?” Jeanty says.
“My motivation, my drive,” he says, “comes from my love and passion for the game.”
The urgency he plays with also comes from years of waiting his turn—preparing to seize the opportunity he finally has now. In Italy, in Texas, in Boise, he waited. He worked. All his life, he took to heart the mantras his father, Harry, told him from his years in the military. One of Harry’s favorite sayings proved especially prescient for Ashton’s football career:
“To be disciplined is to be patient. To be disciplined is to be ready.”
Every Thursday, Montgomery takes his running backs out to dinner. On one recent trip to Red Lobster, as soon as Jeanty walked in, the entire waitstaff flocked to him, and later to the team’s table, requesting pictures and autographs. He kindly obliged. It happens everywhere he goes in Boise, from gas stations to local restaurants like Fork, Matador, and Barbacoa Grill. Sometimes the attention seems so overwhelming that Montgomery suggests Jeanty put his hood up so that people can’t recognize him, but somehow, they always do. His roommate, Broncos safety Zion Washington, jokingly says that he tries to “be like the security sometimes.”
Lines for autographs after games are so long that sometimes actual Boise State security guards have to tell him it’s OK to wrap things up; he can’t possibly sign everything. But Jeanty never turns anyone down, even responding to the dozens of letters his parents receive on his behalf.
He has charisma and is described by those closest to him as “joyous” and “goofy,” and he has the ability to make his teammates and even strangers feel appreciated. “That’s hard for a 20-year-old kid,” Montgomery says, “to have that type of pressure and that type of attention everywhere he goes.”
He could have left Boise State after a breakout sophomore campaign in which he rushed for 1,347 yards; bigger D-I programs came calling, hoping to lure him away. His father, Harry, says Jeanty had multiple “million-dollar” NIL offers. His son could easily, “like other people would do, grab that money bag,” Harry says. Plus, things didn’t exactly seem stable at Boise State; head coach Andy Avalos was fired in November 2023 and was replaced by Danielson, who had been the team’s defensive coordinator.
Jeanty was adamant that he wanted to stay. He loved the Boise community, his teammates. “Coach,” Jeanty told Danielson, “I’m a part of this team. I’m all in.” It was a rare decision for a player of Jeanty’s caliber to make in the current NIL era. “College football has become very transactional,” Danielson says. “I’m not saying that’s bad, good, or indifferent. It’s the way that it is. … A lot of people make that decision [to transfer]. That’s fine. Ashton’s built different, and he wants to leave a legacy. He’s loyal, he wants to be a part of a team, a part of a family, and he wants to bet on himself.”
Boise State, too, is different. “This is a place that’s built on blue collar,” Danielson says.
Jeanty’s father taught him how to work hard from a young age. When the family lived in Jacksonville, Florida, Ashton saw his father wake up at 4 a.m. each morning and prepare for work. “He never complained,” Jeanty says. “He just kept his head down and kept working.” It was something that stuck with him—so much so that he never needed his father to wake him up for early football practices. Jeanty would pop up on his own while the sun was coming up. He viewed sports not just as fun but as a responsibility—something he wanted to give his all to, just as his father had to the Navy.
Harry often told Jeanty and his siblings a myriad of lessons from his military service. He urged them to stay humble. Never be late. When you enter a room, don’t be the loudest person—but you also shouldn’t be the one person who has nothing to say. People will give you the respect that you give them.
Jeanty was so competitive as a child that even when he lost playing video games, he’d start crying. He had so much energy, Pamela could often be heard yelling: “Get down! Don’t jump!” He began channeling that energy into sports, starting with flag football and basketball. He already had a quiet focus—he seemed to understand his purpose. “People just thought I was just playing and running around the backyard,” Ashton says, “but no, I was trying to get better. I was trying to be the best.”
His older brother, Amir, excelled in football, and that made Jeanty want to take the sport more seriously. He became more passionate, and the sport seemed to come naturally to him. “[Basketball] made him really fluid,” Amir says. “In basketball, there’s a really big focus, especially as the offensive player, to be creative, how to create space, how to get away from the defense.”
He took those skills and applied them to football, Amir says, and quickly flourished. As he entered middle school in Norfolk, Virginia, Jeanty was breaking off big runs and eluding defenders, much as he does now. His team was winning. Everything seemed like it was clicking. But that was when his parents broke the news that they’d be moving to Italy for his father’s job as a senior enlisted adviser to the commander of the naval base in Naples. Jeanty was 12 when his family moved to the small town of Gricignano Di Aversa in October 2016. Their neighborhood was surrounded by miles of grassy farmland. It was quiet and isolated, and Jeanty and his three siblings, Amir and sisters Alyssa and Ariana, didn’t know anyone. Nor did they speak any Italian.
“It was extremely hard at the time. Change,” Jeanty says, is “one of the hardest things as a person, especially a young person, to deal with.
“Leaving friends, family, leaving the sport I play, all my teammates, coaches behind,” he says, “I feel that really was the hardest thing to get over.”
To make matters worse, once he arrived, he learned that the school he’d be attending didn’t offer football until high school. It would be about two years until he’d be able to play again. He worked as hard as he could without official practices and focused on his stamina and strength while continuing to play hoops. He slipped into a beat that’s familiar to children in military families: change, adapt, change, adapt. “They’re very resilient,” Pamela says.
Davis, the Naples Wildcats coach, wasn’t sure what to make of Jeanty when he tried out for the team in ninth grade. He saw his clear athleticism and impressive strength but had questions about his toughness since he hadn’t played competitively since moving to Italy. “I just wasn’t sure if he could give a hit or take a hit,” Davis says.
Then, in one of the team’s early training sessions, 14-year-old Ashton went up against a senior linebacker and plowed over him with ease, sending the defender onto his rear. Dusting himself off, the senior player looked at Davis: “Coach. He’s the real deal.”
Jeanty’s parents recalled their son relishing the opportunity to travel not just across Italy—to Vicenza, near Venice, or to Aviano—but all over Europe. Ashton played well in those road games. But there was one problem: No one back in the States knew who he was. He started dreaming of playing college football in America. And he knew he’d have to leave Italy to be seen by the insular world of college recruiting, and to prove himself against stiffer competition.
“I don’t think anybody’s going to recruit me from here,” he told his dad one day.
By 2019, Harry was ready to retire from the Navy, and realizing his son was serious about football, moved the family to Frisco, Texas, where they had relatives. But much like he had in Italy, Ashton once again had to wait his turn. He was a 15-year-old sophomore, stuck behind several upperclassmen at Lone Star High. As a result, he had to play a variety of defensive positions, including linebacker, safety, and defensive end. “Playing wherever they would put me because I just wanted to get on the field,” Jeanty says. “I’ll do whatever it takes for the team.”
He wouldn’t allow himself to get discouraged. His coach at Lone Star, Jeff Rayburn, recalled spotting Jeanty running alone on the football field before sunrise or lifting weights by himself after his teammates had gone home. “He just got here, and he felt like he had something to prove,” Rayburn says.
As a junior, Jeanty finally got a chance to play on offense, but mostly at slot receiver because another running back was still ahead of him on the depth chart. He was good at it—so good that he was named to the Texas All-State team. But he wanted to play running back. “I think it all just showed me how to trust the process,” he says. “Even when things don’t go your way, I still have an opportunity to do great things. Whatever you’ve been given, what do you do with it?”
He’d eventually get scholarship offers from FBS schools like Boise State, New Mexico, Kansas, and Cal, as well as from the Air Force, Army, and Navy football programs. But he still felt overlooked, and it made him wonder whether he was doing enough. “Even the schools that I was right there in their backyard that overlooked me, I think that fueled my fire even more, made me go harder, … really work harder than everyone else,” Jeanty says.
Jeanty’s patience paid off when he finally became Lone Star High’s starting running back as a senior. All of those snaps he had played on defense—and all his years playing basketball—helped when he finally switched to offense. The force, the quickness, the agility—it was all there. And after rushing for 1,843 yards and scoring a whopping 41 touchdowns (31 rushing, 10 receiving), he headed off for Boise State.
But finding himself in a new environment in Idaho, he had to prove himself all over again. There were players ahead of him, including George Holani, who was a two-time All-Conference running back.
It was like his father would say, “To be disciplined is to be patient. To be disciplined is to be ready.” Jeanty split carries with Holani for two seasons, before the latter left for the NFL, where he’s now on the Seahawks’ practice squad. Jeanty turned heads in the weight room, squatting ridiculous numbers, outworking himself each day. That freshman season in 2022, he had 821 yards rushing on 156 carries. As a sophomore in 2023, he exploded into the national spotlight, with 1,347 rushing yards and 14 touchdowns, and was named first-team All-American by ESPN and USA Today.
“A lot of people, they’re barely finding out about Ashton Jeanty this year,” Holani says. “But the previous year before this year, he was also able to put up a lot of numbers.
“He’s a playmaker,” Holani says. “He can do it all.”
Jeanty’s anything but complacent. He is “intentional” in his training, Montgomery says, paying attention to little details and asking layered questions during film sessions. During fall camp this past August, the team did a casual 30-minute walk-through practice. Players were in tennis shoes. Afterward, Jeanty walked up to Danielson. He was visibly frustrated and told his coach that he wanted to call a players-only meeting. “The urgency tonight in this walk-through wasn’t it. I’m not good with it,” Jeanty told him.
Danielson was taken aback. Plenty of players, even Heisman candidates, don’t have that kind of leadership at a mere walk-through.
The next day, Ashton led the players in a closed meeting, and it helped set the tone for the Broncos season. Boise State is currently 11-1, in first place in the Mountain West, and has a chance to land a spot in the first 12-team College Football Playoff. And while it might be easy to look at Jeanty’s numbers and assume that the Broncos are a one-man team, he often reminds his teammates how much he values them.
Often in practice, when a receiver makes a big catch, Jeanty will sprint over and yell: “Dude! That’s what you can do! I believe in you, man!” If he notices a teammate is looking down, he’ll approach Danielson and say: “I want to build more into him this week.” When Jeanty was asked about a moment when he could truly appreciate how far he had come on his unconventional journey, he picked a win over San Diego State in which his teammates—including quarterback Maddux Madsen, receivers Latrell Caples and Cameron Camper, and cornerback A’Marion McCoy—had career games. “People have been saying it’s just me,” Jeanty says, “and if all they do is stop me, then they can win—which, nobody can stop me. But just for the offense to come together in a big way, and even the defense. … I just love the way our team came together.”
As the Heisman ceremony approaches, Jeanty’s fame continues to grow. The autograph lines are long, but Jeanty walks around with a smile as if he, too, can’t believe he’s here. But he doesn’t boast, Pamela says. “Success is great,” she reminds him, “but it’s about how you go about it.”
Before games, he reminds himself: “Do what no. 2 does.” That isn’t just breaking tackles or exploding downfield. It’s about having fun. Letting loose. Just as he did as a high school freshman looking out the window and watching the European countryside pass by, dreaming of being exactly where he is right now.
