BOISE, Idaho – He has a sandwich named after him and a line of personalized athletic gear. He has his own trading cards and people hunting him down in hotel lobbies across the Pacific Ocean. And now Ashton Jeanty is in a chiropractor’s office on the northwest side of town, on the morning of his off day, wondering what to do about the ex-Marine handing him a medal.
See, the chiropractor has a buddy. That buddy has two kids. Those kids, like many in this city and a large number of people outside it, are over the moon for the Boise State tailback who runs like a hypersonic tank while rearranging what’s possible in college football. So the chiropractor’s friend wonders if Jeanty could sign some stuff for his kids. For a player keen on impact, it’s not a problem.
It isn’t odd, either, when the guy says Jeanty reminds him of Walter Payton; these days, people say a lot of wild things about him. But then the guy wants to trade something in return for the autographs. He pulls out an Achievement Medal, which is given to Marines who demonstrate performance of a superlative nature. It is the first time in months that Ashton Jeanty is stopped cold. “I told him I couldn’t take it, but he insisted,” he says, sitting in a stadium lounge the next day. “My dad was in the Navy. I understand how big of a deal it is.”
That’s life at the solar core of a phenomenon. Boise State is tracking toward a spot in the first 12-team College Football Playoff largely off the energy produced by a Heisman Trophy candidate who squats 605 pounds, who runs fast enough to earn a speeding ticket in a school zone, and who is on pace to break Barry Sanders’ 36-year-old NCAA record for rushing yards in a season. Ashton Jeanty has outrushed 90 teams so far in 2024. He has created a frenzy that’s spilled far out of the Treasure Valley, and boggling highlights only partly explain why.
He is doing things nobody does in this top-heavy and transactional age of college football. He may end up disrupting structures tilted to the power programs, on the field and off of it. Or he may be a blip. A glitch in the system. It’s why no one looks away. They can’t be sure they’ll see anything like this ever again.
“Superman, dude,” Boise State sports performance director Ben Hilgart says. “He’s Superman.”
In 87 years of competition at five different levels, from junior college to the present-day Football Bowl Subdivision, Boise State has endured a total of 10 losing seasons. Half of them happened before 1950. For all that sustained success, the program nevertheless was college football kitsch well into the 21st century, playing on a blue turf field in a high-desert city, winning while striving to do more with substantially less. “They used to tell us we couldn’t practice at night,” says Dirk Koetter, the Broncos’ head coach at the turn of the century, “because it cost $20,000 to turn the lights on.”
Things have changed. There is nothing mom-and-pop about the school’s 70,000-square-foot Bleymaier Football Center, except maybe the inflated neon Frankenstein in the lobby. The two-story, theater-style team room could host TED Talks. There are more than 30 listed support staffers beyond Boise State’s full-time coaches.
Koetter, back as offensive coordinator at age 65, operates out of an office he thinks might be bigger than the old press box. It overlooks a north end zone of Albertsons Stadium set for a $65 million renovation this winter, creating premium seating and a hospitality space that will double as an athlete dining and nutrition center. Three Fiesta Bowl banners hang at the south end of the structure.
If this is a Cinderella, she’s wearing a steel-toe boot. “It’s not lightning in a bottle,” athletic director Jeramiah Dickey says. “Now you actually have an opportunity to ‘do epic,’ and that’s been our goal from the very beginning.”
This fall, it’s all dust and gas trailing 5-foot-9, 215-pound Ashton Jeanty. His unusual path is increasingly common knowledge: The son of a Navy commanding officer, he dominated football fields in Italy for three years before his family moved to Frisco, Texas, for his sophomore year of high school. Still, Jeanty wasn’t a lead tailback until his senior season.
His one power-conference offer came from Cal. He rebuffed all attempts to flip his college commitment after scoring 41 touchdowns for Lone Star High in 2021, joining Boise State as a 17-year-old early enrollee that winter. Jeanty has been good – he was the Mountain West Conference offensive player of the year in 2023 – but now he’s something else.
Going into a crucial Friday showdown with fellow playoff hopeful UNLV, Jeanty has 1,248 rushing yards, which is more than 200 yards clear of anyone else even after his bye week. He has eight touchdown runs of 50-plus yards. He has four touchdown runs of 70-plus yards. He’s on pace to eclipse Sanders’ record of 2,628 rushing yards in a season and the mark of 37 rushing scores is in play.
“It’s greatness, what he’s doing,” safety Zion Washington says.
One touch, one touchdown for @AshtonJeanty2 😮💨
📺 FS2#BleedBlue | #HEI2MAN | @Stor_It_SS pic.twitter.com/sZAgecZZTD
— Boise State Football (@BroncoSportsFB) October 5, 2024
How Boise State ensured Jeanty is doing it here, this fall, is a blueprint for football programs without bottomless name, image and likeness compensation troughs. It’s also enough of an outlier, on every level, to make one wonder how repeatable it is.
By the time Spencer Danielson’s interim head coach stint became his permanent gig last December – Andy Avalos was fired after a 5-5 start, then the Broncos won three straight under Danielson – coaches elsewhere had begun to shop the roster. The most alluring item was the running back with NFL talent and two years of eligibility remaining. “He could have gone anywhere in the country,” fullback Tyler Crowe says of the offers Jeanty received from power programs with deep NIL reserves. “It was basically like ‘Road to Glory’ on NCAA (Football 2024).”
Within hours of Danielson’s promotion, the new head coach and Dickey met with Jeanty. They put Jeanty’s father, Harry, on speakerphone. They laid out a plan comprising Jeanty’s football development for the next year and a proposal on the NIL front. Reports that Jeanty received something in the realm of $300,000 are, according to a person familiar with the dealings, accurate. And that’s essentially base compensation.
Jeanty launched The Deuce Collection of personalized gear in early October. He spent part of his bye-week off day signing 300 cards for a nascent sports memorabilia company out of Los Angeles. He’s trying to start a podcast. (“Not going to release too many details,” Jeanty says with a smile.) It all can add to the kitty.
It is also somewhat beside the point, he says.
“I’ve said in a lot of interviews, and I’ll keep saying it – for me, it was never really about the money,” Jeanty says. “It was just about what’s going to be best for my future, as a player, as a teammate. Where can I still keep getting developed to go to the next level? And that undoubtedly was here.”
Relationships, everyone insists, were the currency that bridged the gap. Before Danielson was Jeanty’s head coach, and before Jeanty was Danielson’s Mjolnir in cleats, the two linked up in one of Boise State’s “Unity Groups,” which mix and match players of different positions and ages and are led by assistants who didn’t deal with those players daily.
The two immediately found common ground in what they believed, football-wise and otherwise. They began attending church services together. An infrastructure of trust grew. So in the fall of 2023, Jeanty felt much the same as other Broncos working through the uncertainty of a mid-year coaching change: As long as Danielson got the full-time job, he was staying put.
“I knew,” Jeanty says, “exactly what I was going to get from him.”
Boise State has forever leaned on a blue-collar ethos – pay no attention to that $25,000 capital commitment required for a new end-zone Loge Box season ticket – and personal connections to compensate. There’s a “Built Different” mural painted, graffiti-style, in a stairwell in the football building. “I’m (putting) all my chips on the table with these players,” Danielson says, noting that’s why he gave up defensive play-calling duties.
But Ashton Jeanty is an anomaly. A player raised with military values who puts a premium on loyalty. A non-power conference program bets on that player before everyone realizes how good he is. The player becomes a star with seven-figure incentives to transfer dangled before him. The school does all it can to convince the player to stay, which is not a dollar-for-dollar match, and it happens to be enough. It ends in a confetti blast of celebrity.
How is that going to happen again along the banks of the Boise River? Or anywhere?
Danielson likes to say his tailback is a “10 of 10.” Maybe it’s closer to one of one. “I work with him every single day,” Crowe says. “And sometimes I just have to sit back and be like, ‘Dude, this is one of the best college running backs of all time.’”
As ever, this once-upon-a-time junior college gone big will aim to reinvent itself to sustain success.
“We’re not going to get a $20 million check to go find everybody you can,” Danielson says. “And that’s OK. But we’re going to work our tails off to find the right guys, to keep our players – which is operation number one for me. We have to make sure we keep our team. And if we can consistently do that, and add the right guys that fit this place from the (transfer) portal, I really believe we’ll be on the cutting edge.”
As much as Boise State has, it has to have more. And it has so much to build on now, as it sizes up the chance to upend college football power dynamics in the new postseason. But what it’s building on also may be a generational event.
It can’t count on another Ashton Jeanty.
Heisman Trophy front-runner Ashton Jeanty runs onto the field before last season’s game against UNLV. (Ian Maule / Getty Images)
Inside the sprawling Sheraton Waikiki Beach Resort, one of the best college football players in America is in town for a road game at Hawaii. He could be anywhere. So people are looking everywhere. One such interested party follows a group of Boise State players through the hotel lobby and to the second floor, as they’re retreating to their rooms. The woman approaches one of the players in the pack, senior receiver Latrell Caples, and asks a question.
Are you Ashton?
“You don’t even know what he looks like?” Caples recalls thinking. “That was the craziest. I’m pretty sure he’s had his own moments.”
All phenomenons do. And, sometimes, there are so many of them that they don’t leave much space for the normal ones.
Those around the program suspected what was coming at the end of a youth camp last summer. The line leading to the table for Jeanty autographs wrapped around Boise State’s indoor practice facility. A camp director was forced to limit how many items Jeanty would sign and even cut off selfie-taking, so the main attraction could, you know, leave.
If it was only the last breakaway he had to make. When Jeanty goes to church, he can’t leave a religious service without many minutes of fan service afterward. The Broncos tailback visited a seemingly quiet Boise mall on a weekday and reported back to Caples that he was swarmed by people “out of nowhere.”
After home games, Broncos players take a lap around the stadium to thank the fans. Guess who’s always the last person in the locker room. “That would frustrate me a little bit if I was Ashton,” quarterback Maddux Madsen says. “But he’s such a nice guy that it’s like, all these people are out there supporting me and cheering me on, how could I not give back to them?”
Some of this is expected in a college town, even if the college town is a small city. Solo interview appearances on ESPN and FOX are not. Not for Boise State players. Nor is getting praised by Marshawn Lynch. Nor is sitting at home and showing your roommate a phone notification that Kevin Durant now follows you on social media. “Like, that just doesn’t happen,” Washington says.
Nor is it common to add a police officer as dedicated security for a player. But that’s what Boise State did not long ago. A former Broncos linebacker now trails the star running back on game days – “He’s not afraid to hit somebody, you know?” Jeanty jokes – which turned out to be a wise decision a couple weeks ago in paradise.
Jeanty made it to his hotel room fine after arriving for the Hawaii game. He changed into swim trunks and a tank top and headed to the pool. Once the elevator doors opened, there was no time to breathe, let alone take a dip. Fans of all persuasions – Boise partisans, Hawaii faithful, random people – asking for a picture or an autograph with every step. He was able to make a Thursday night running backs dinner at RumFire, an eatery on hotel grounds. It was a temporary reprieve. “As soon as we leave the restaurant,” Crowe says, “everyone’s hounding him.”
Not even the regiments of game day stemmed it. Fans lined the path from the Aloha Stadium field to the locker room, about four-to-five deep and mostly wearing Hawaii green. They asked for Jeanty’s autograph, for pictures, for his gloves. They asked for his helmet. (“I’m like, I gotta get this back to my equipment guy, Bill,” Jeanty says.)
They crowded the Boise State team bus to make their last-ditch pleas. They begged Jeanty to come off. When that didn’t work, according to Crowe, some of them tried to sneak on.
The object of their obsession, meanwhile, does what he does. He plows ahead. “It’s definitely a great thing,” Jeanty says. “The biggest thing that stands out to me is the impact I’m able to have and influencing people in a positive way.”
Inside the program, Jeanty is begrudged none of it. It is pretty clear, for example, that a tailback who averages a first down every time he carries the football – who distorts defenses, who opens up things for others, who willingly and effectively picks up blitzers and who generally relieves pressure on everyone – is very helpful in the pursuit of a College Football Playoff appearance.
“If you don’t have somebody with you, good luck,” Washington says. “His bag, it’s so deep. He can juke you. He can run through you. He can jump over you. He can outrun you. He has everything in his toolbox.”
They also see the process. They see Jeanty in the training room at 6 a.m., getting treatment before anyone has to be in the building. They see him, as they’re walking out at the end of the day, doing extra stretches. Or another workout. (Which would explain how someone gets clocked running 22.86 miles per hour in a game, as Jeanty was earlier this season). Or talking through concepts with a freshman running back.
They hear about him volunteering for special teams duty after that phase cost them a win at Oregon. They hear him, directly, during a players-only meeting midway through preseason camp, calling out the group’s energy and attention to detail as the Broncos’ only unanimously elected captain.
Constructively? Jeanty demanded honesty from leaders at each position, so everyone knew where they stood. Bluntly? He invited anyone going through the motions to get up and leave. “We 100 percent needed that,” defensive end Ahmed Hassanein says.
They see him paying it forward, too. They see Jeanty’s announcement that he’s endowing a football scholarship at Boise State, before he’s left Boise State. They join him for meals and eat for free; after one breakfast at The Griddle, a nearby diner, Caples pulled out his card only to have the waitress inform him Jeanty already covered the tab for four teammates. Offensive linemen are gifted Jeanty’s gift cards from The James, all thanks to a sandwich, which is a reflection of how hilariously distended the orbit of Ashton Jeanty has become.
But there it is, on the menu between honey grilled chicken and a meatball sub. The Ashton Jeanty #2. It, too, is the result of a carefully articulated process. Working with a chef, Jeanty chose and taste-tested meats and cheeses and breads and toppings. He landed on turkey and provolone, trimmed with peppadew peppers, pickled red onions and spring mix. And sriracha mayo, because his father put sriracha mayo on everything. Whatever this was, Jeanty notes, it was going to have some sauce.
It is, according to a midday staffer at The James, very popular.
“You had the sandwich?” Jeanty says, excitedly, when he learns a visitor has done some, uh, reporting on this matter. “What do you think?”
The Ashton Jeanty #2 is very good, he’s told. There’s really no denying it.
The Ashton Jeanty #2 sandwich is featured on the menu at The James in Boise, Idaho. (Brian Hamilton / The Athletic)
On a second-floor wall of the Bleymaier Football Center, out of public view but unmissable once you climb the lobby stairs, a massive mosaic celebrates Kellen Moore. Over four years as Boise State’s quarterback, Moore set the record for career wins by an FBS quarterback (50) and became the program’s first Heisman Trophy finalist, finishing fourth in 2010. He is, around these parts, a football deity.
Midway through another work-of-art season, the school might need to find space to accommodate another shrine. “I’m not sure anyone here ever thought there would be a player that could be even mentioned in the same category with a Kellen Moore,” Dickey says. “And you have this guy now that is. I just hope people don’t take it for granted and that they enjoy it while it’s here.”
The idea of being commemorated like that gives Ashton Jeanty a laugh. “If I get to New York,” he says, “I think they’ll hook me up with something.” He’s only sort of joking. All eyes are on what’s to come for Boise State in the rest of 2024, and all it could mean. Jeanty has permitted himself some of that stargazing, too. The evidence is tucked away where he alone can see it.
A vision board, above the desk in his bedroom. Jeanty says he created it before this season. Winning the Heisman Trophy is on it. So is becoming a first-round pick in the NFL Draft. Jeanty talked through the ambitions with Washington, his roommate. He insisted he could change the paradigms. No running back has won a Heisman Trophy since Alabama’s Derrick Henry in 2015. No player from a Group of Five school has won it since BYU’s Ty Detmer in 1990. And Boise State has produced five NFL first-round picks in its history.
As they discussed the goals, Washington naturally supported his friend, while wondering if college football realities might stamp them out. Then came the night before the season opener against Georgia Southern. Washington prodded Jeanty on what stats he was about to post. Jeanty said he figured he’d get five touchdowns.
He scored six.
Reality, run over and through.
“I dreamed of it,” Jeanty says. “I prayed for it. I worked my tail off every day to try to get to this. I’m not going to say it’s a surprise. With the way I’ve worked, just the people that have been put around me to help me – yeah, I definitely imagined it coming to this. Not this early. And not like this, per se. But, you know, here we are.”
(Illustration: Meech Robinson; The Athletic; photos: Loren Orr, Darryl Oumi / Getty Images)