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On a practice field on the outskirts of a thousand-year-old city, Jim Davis handed the high school freshman a football and told him his objective. It was to impress upon the senior linebacker waiting on the other side of the offensive line that this new member of the Naples Wildcats was not going to be wrestled to the grass without a fight. Ashton Jeanty nodded and eagerly waited for the snap.
“Ashton chose a hole, went through it and he, excuse my French, put the kid right on his ass,” said Davis, head coach of the Wildcats. “Until you see a kid take that first hit, you never know. That first hit alleviated any doubts.”
Before Jeanty introduced himself to the country with his imposing and relentless running style that has made him an early Heisman Trophy front-runner at Boise State, he was a newbie on the football team at a U.S. Naval Support base in the ancient town of Aversa, Italy, 15 miles north of Naples. His father, Harry, who served in the Navy as a commanding officer, was relocated there prior to the start of Ashton’s seventh-grade year. It was there in a town known for producing some of Italy’s best buffalo mozzarella, sparkling white wine and its abundance of Catholic churches that Jeanty took his first real steps toward stardom.
“Over there,” Harry Jeanty said, “Ashton was in heaven.”
Ashton Jeanty (center) played football in Italy before his family moved to Texas. (Courtesy of Jim Davis)
Through the first two weeks of the 2024 season, Jeanty leads the nation in yards rushing (459), rushing touchdowns (nine) and forced missed tackles (22). A week after his head-turning 267-yard, six-touchdown performance at Georgia Southern, Jeanty followed it up by punishing an Oregon defense many considered among the best in the country for 192 yards and three touchdowns in a 37-34 near upset that came down to a last-second made field goal by Oregon.
Jeanty had the most rushing yards by a visiting player at Autzen Stadium since Washington’s Myles Gaskin in 2016. The loss hasn’t deterred Boise State’s star from the belief he has in his team’s heights this year.
“We’ve got one of the best teams in the country,” Jeanty said postgame. “We fell short, but whoever we play from here on out these next 10 games, we’re going to dominate.”
#RB1 Ashton Jeanty currently leads the FBS in…
Rushing yards: 459
Rushing TDs: 9
Forced missed tackles: 22 pic.twitter.com/uRJyGNMhmG— Dane Brugler (@dpbrugler) September 9, 2024
Jeanty, like he did on that poor senior linebacker way back when, runs through whatever lies ahead of him. Oftentimes, he just pings off confused defenders who can’t match his downhill power and keeps motoring ahead. At 5 feet 9 and 215 pounds, the junior running back is not only absurdly strong — he can squat 600 pounds — but he has been timed at hitting 22.5 mph in games. He is considered the No. 1 running back prospect for the 2025 NFL Draft by The Athletic’s draft expert Dane Brugler.
Brugler appropriately wrote in his scouting report: “The man hates to be tackled.”
Yeah, that about sums him up. At least on the field. His path to becoming the next great Boise State running back and one of the country’s best players did not start with him being hyped by recruiting services nationwide at a young age.
The Naples Wildcats had to take a nine-hour bus ride to face the closest team, at an Air Force base in Aviano at the foot of the Dolomite mountain range. There were trips to play on an Army base near Venice. They flew commercially to Rota, Spain, to play the team on the Naval base there. And one game featured an 18-hour bus ride to Spangdahlem, Germany. They’d typically sleep on the gymnasium floor on Friday nights before playing on Saturday and eventually the long journey back to southern Italy.
Davis said his roster size each year is usually around 30 tops, so everyone is playing offense and defense. Jeanty played everywhere and was in a class all his own even as a freshman. But prior to the start of his sophomore year in 2019, the family found out it was moving stateside to the greater Dallas area.
“My wife immediately said, ‘Oh, that’s a shame you’re losing him!’” Davis recalled, “And I said, ‘No, he needs to go back and get exposed.’”
That June, Lone Star High School coach Jeff Rayburn received two emails informing him that a new student and potential addition to the team was en route from Italy to the school in Frisco, Texas. That was a first.
“We didn’t know anything about him,” Rayburn said, “but when he showed up, we found out real quick.”
Jeanty joined a Lone Star team filled with star talent including future NFL players like Marvin Mims Jr. and Jaylan Ford. His sophomore year, he played wherever Rayburn’s staff needed him to, from safety to linebacker to slot receiver to defensive end. As a junior, he split running back reps with Jaden Nixon, who went on to play at Oklahoma State before transferring to Western Michigan. And Jeanty often terrorized defenses as a slot receiver with his elusiveness. When Jeanty’s senior season rolled around, he finally became RB1 at Lone Star. And from there he asserted himself.
Jeanty accounted for 41 total touchdowns in 12 games his senior year. He rushed for 1,843 yards on 229 carries, averaging 8 yards per carry. He owned Class 5A football in Texas, but blue-blood offers weren’t exactly rolling in. Boise State offered him in May 2021. Prior to that featured offers from the likes of Navy, Dartmouth, Cal, New Mexico and Penn. The only in-state schools to offer Jeanty were Texas State, Sam Houston State and North Texas.
“Nowadays the way recruiting is, if you’re not being committed as a junior, the Texases, Alabamas, Georgias, they’ve already pinpointed who they wanted to take,” Rayburn said. “I think if Ashton would’ve played running back full time as a junior, he wouldn’t have ended up at Boise. I think he would’ve ended up at a Power 4 school.”
Jeanty committed to Boise State the fall of his senior season. And once he got to Boise the following year, he immediately made an impact, rushing for 821 yards and seven touchdowns as a freshman in 2022 backing up incumbent George Holani. Then came the sophomore leap as Jeanty established himself as one of the breakout players of the season a year ago, rushing for 1,347 yards and 14 touchdowns despite missing two games to injury.
The Broncos won the Mountain West Conference title last year but only after dealing with the late-season dismissal of head coach Andy Avalos in November. Three weeks later, they were in Las Vegas hoisting the MWC trophy after beating UNLV 44-20. Jeanty had a game-high 153 yards.
But even before the blue and orange confetti fell inside Allegiant Stadium, Boise State was in a battle to keep its star happy at home.
“Before we win the MWC championship game, the amount of influx with illegal tampering with Ashton, to his family, to him, to position coaches, head coaches calling him … he was getting bombarded,” Boise State coach Spencer Danielson said. “He was like, ‘Coach, I want to be here. I want to be part of this family and help this team win games. This is where I committed to coming out of high school, this is what I’m about.’ And he hasn’t looked back since.”
Asked to clarify just how many teams came calling, Jeanty laughed: “Nah, but we’ll just say it was a lot.”
Harry Jeanty said the attention was overwhelming, but also expected.
“I guess the norm now is people have a tendency to jump where the money is. Is that making sense for them? Probably,” he said. “But for Ashton, I’ve always told him to stay humble, work hard and everything else will fall into place. It makes sense for him to be at Boise because, look, somebody can offer you whatever amount of money — and there were a lot of offers out there — you could take those offers, but when you get on campus, do you really know what’s going to happen?”
It didn’t stop with Jeanty and his family, either.
“I got plenty of phone calls about trying to get Ashton out of there and people were telling me they were offering him this, that or the other,” Rayburn said.
What coaches who drooled over the idea of Jeanty in their backfield didn’t understand is that the military kid who bounced around Virginia, Florida, Texas and even Italy had finally found a place he called a home.
“The love for my team and for this program, that’s what keeping me here,” he said. “The people in this city. Nothing beats what I have here at Boise State. No amount of money can outweigh that.”
Money doesn’t hurt, though. Boise-area sports radio host Mike Prater reported three days after the MWC title win that Jeanty received a new name, image and likeness deal that included $300,000, housing and a car to stay in blue.
“I was glad to see they’d done that because, obviously, Ashton deserved every penny that they presented to him because he would’ve gotten at least three or four times more elsewhere,” Harry Jeanty said. “But it’s not all about the money. It’s about Ashton being in the right place and being able to make a difference.”
Danielson confirmed that Jeanty was getting offered “substantially more” to leave. He chose to stay, which once again made the Broncos a team to beat in the MWC and a dark-horse candidate to make a run to the new 12-team College Football Playoff.
“The people here have embraced him,” Danielson said. “Ashton Jeanty’s a household name here for the rest of his life.”
And the word is out to the rest of the country, too.
To be worthy of the #HEI2MAN, you have to be #BuiltDifferenthttps://t.co/2fDkCvClio#BleedBlue pic.twitter.com/RgfmK1rZ6h
— Boise State Football (@BroncoSportsFB) August 28, 2024
Jeanty’s stunning start came on the heels of a Boise State Heisman campaign that kicked off earlier than most Aug. 28. The athletic department knew it had to get Jeanty’s name out there early as a Group of 5 school whose star could get lost in the Heisman haze come October or November. It won’t be easy to continue to keep the nation’s attention, but if the numbers continue, the sport will have no choice.
Alabama’s Derrick Henry was the last running back to win the trophy in 2015. The last time a G5 player was invited to New York City as a Heisman Trophy finalist was 2013 when Northern Illinois QB Jordan Lynch was on the list.
His nine rushing touchdowns are the most of any FBS player through the first two weeks of the season since Ricky Williams at Texas in 1998 — the same year Williams went on to lift the Heisman. Jeanty is not afraid of any sort of jinx. Quite the opposite, in fact. He welcomes the hype machine he now powers with his stout frame.
In the end zone, which he got to know so well at Georgia Southern in the season opener, Jeanty lifted his right leg and stuck out his right arm and hit the first Heisman pose of the season. There will certainly be more in the coming weeks if he keeps running through whatever is in front of him.
(Photo: Tom Hauck / Getty Images)
