Thor Nystrom delivers the NFL Draft Profile featuring the projected top running back in the class, Ashton Jeanty.

Ashton Jeanty

  • 5-foot-9, 217 pounds
  • College: Boise St. 
  • Comp: LaDainian Tomlinson
  • Thor Nystrom's Rank: RB1

When you hit the overpass approaching the U.S. Navy Support Site outside Naples, Italy, you’ll notice a manicured American football field stretching out before you. This field is a piece of football history – it’s where Ashton Jeanty learned to play football.

The son of a Navy chief petty officer, Jeanty spent a little over three years on this Navy base. Inside the encampment, you might think you’re in America. About 500 families live in homes with manicured lawns dotting the paved roads. There is an American grocery store on the base, as well as a movie theater and a bowling alley. 

Naples High School football coach Jim Davis actually discovered Jeanty on the basketball court. This was back in seventh grade – Jeanty’s first year in Italy – when Jeanty stood 5-foot-5. Davis recalls that Jeanty could very nearly dunk the ball at the time. To put this in perspective: The 5-foot-3 Muggsy Bogues had a 44-inch vertical leap – and Bogues never once dunked in an NBA game.

No opponent was close to Naples High. The football team’s shortest road trip was nine hours. The longest, to play a team on a German military base, required an 18-hour bus ride. The team would leave the day before and sleep on the floor of a gymnasium. Since the Naples High football field doesn’t have lights, a few of its home games were played in nearby Pozzuoli – in Carney Park, which resides in the crater of a dormant volcano.

As a freshman, Jeanty led Davis’ team to the DODEA-Europe Division II title game. After the season, Davis sat Jeanty down and suggested that he needed to move back to the United States to draw the attention of American recruiters. Jeanty enrolled at Lone Star High School in Frisco, Texas, joining a team that already had future NFL players Marvin Mims Jr. and Jaylan Ford. The RB room featured future Oklahoma State/Western Michigan RB Jaden Nixon.

Nixon’s stranglehold on the position forced Jeanty to play a hybrid role. As a junior, Jeanty took the majority of his snaps in the slot. Basically, Jeanty was tasked with replacing Marvin Mims – off to Oklahoma – while shifting into the backfield when Nixon needed a breather. After the season, Jeanty was named all-district – as a receiver. 

Jeanty did not have a lot of recruiting interest heading into his senior campaign. When Boise State offered in May of that year, it was easily the most attractive of Jeanty’s offers. There was also a cool bit of symmetry going on, as the Broncos had previously developed Frisco native Jay Ajayi.

With Nixon out the door, Jeanty ran for 1,843 yards with 41 total TDs in 12 games. Jeanty stayed loyal to Boise even after Cal and Kansas offered late. In his first year at Boise, Jeanty forced a timeshare with incumbent RB1 George Holani. Jeanty emerged as one of college football’s brightest stars as a sophomore, rushing for 1,347 yards and 14 TD.

"He's difficult to defend," Wyoming coach Jay Sawvel said of Jeanty. "He can catch the ball, you can put him in motion, take him out of the backfield and throw it to him, that's the schematic thing. The next part is he's just a really good player, and you have to tackle the guy.”

In the offseason following his national coming-out party in 2023, Jeanty was inundated with a barrage of P4 NIL offers to bolt Boise. Jeanty briefly considered his options. I can report that he seriously considered an aggressive offer from Arkansas that would have allowed him to follow former Boise State QB Taylen Green to Fayetteville. The Razorbacks were far from the only SEC or Big 10 program in hot pursuit.

"He was honest with us," Boise State athletic director Jeremiah Dickey told CBS Sports. “He was transparent that first and foremost, he wanted to be a Bronco. We've got a ton of student-athletes that we were able to hold onto. But it's not just us throwing money at a problem, it's also getting creative in how we approach it.”

Boise State was able to keep Jeanty for his final season on campus. The Broncos were rewarded with one of the greatest individual running back seasons college football has ever seen. Jeanty’s 2,601 rushing yards in 2024 rank No. 2 all-time behind Barry Sanders’ 2,628 (1988) on the FBS’ single-season record list. 

Jeanty finished No. 2 in the Heisman voting behind Travis Hunter. After the ceremony, I tweeted: “Ashton Jeanty legitimately might be the last of his kind. A singular offensive superstar surefire Round 1 NFL pick who spends his entire career in the G5.”

Ashton Jeanty Scouting Report

The stats are so absurd you’re going to struggle to believe them. Where to begin? Jeanty easily led the nation for the second straight year in yards after contact per attempt, with 5.25. His 151 missed tackles forced led the nation by 49 (Cam Skattebo was second with 101)! 

Jeanty’s 1,970 yards after contact shattered the single-season record CFP-era record, and was more than 250 yards higher than any other RB had… in total! Three-quarters of Jeanty’s rushing yards last season came after contact.

"His yards after contact... is like a ridiculous stat," Penn State HC James Franklin said prior to playing Boise State in Round 2 of the CFP. “I don't know if I've ever seen that before. His ability to make people miss, break tackles and finish runs is really impressive.”

Jeanty has a compact build, 217 pounds of wiry muscle packed tight in a frame that stands a shade under 5-foot-9. Jeanty runs low to the ground, giving defenders one of the smallest surface areas in this class to hit. 

In my decade doing NFL Draft work, I have never seen a college player who is more difficult to tackle. Jeanty has the contact balance of the spinning top at the end of Inception. He is barely fazed by first contact. Defenders slide off Jeanty like they’ve just hugged an electrical fence. 

Jeanty’s speed-to-power conversion juices him with electricity at the contact point. He also has a deep bag of tricks to deal with oncoming defenders, including a tornado spin move. In college, Jeanty posted a career missed tackles forced rate of 37.1% with 4.78 yards after contact per rush. 

Bijan Robinson had 39.3/4.40 at Texas, Saquon Barkley had 25.4/3.51 at Penn State, and Christian McCaffrey had 19.0/2.89 at Stanford. Jeanty’s 5.25 yards after contact per attempt this fall was more than a full-yard higher than that trio ever had in a single season in college football.

Jeanty doesn’t have the like-water agility of Barry Sanders. Jeanty parries flurries of cuts together in space, painting a herky-jerky mirage for defenders. If you think of Sanders like a fish in a creek, you can think of Jeanty like an armored knight slalom skiing. Jeanty picks up speed as he goes, but is capable of immediately making 90-degree direction changes, or flipping directions violently repeatedly while retaining speed and body control.

In the beat after contact, and immediately out of cuts, Jeanty has an instant-acceleration button to get himself back into space. Jeanty has solid long speed, but it’s not elite. The elite trait is Jeanty’s ability to access top speed in a few steps. 

Jeanty has incredible feel – an innate understanding of his job. He has very good vision, of course, and I love his patience. You see this behind the line, as Jeanty waits for a crease, his eyes on the linebackers. 

Jeanty’s style forces second-level defenders to choose their gaps before he does. Once they’ve made their decision, Jeanty ensures it’s the wrong one. Defending Jeanty is an exercise in frustration – at every turn, you are set up to fail.

You also see this patience in the open field. Jeanty gleefully screws with pursuit angles by toggling speeds, sometimes throttling down to a near jog to allow downfield blockers to wipe out threats before re-punching the gas. 

This is where you see his hand-above-the-chessboard genius, maneuvering himself like he’s playing a video game and can see all 11 defenders simultaneously. Jeanty doesn’t pull out the stiff arm unless he has to, but it’s a cattle prod to the facemask when he needs it. 

Jeanty consistently falls forward to get an extra yard or two when he’s dead to rights. He is keenly aware of where the first-down line and end zone are, and you’ll see even more gritty contortionism out of him when he has a shot to cross either. In 2024, 31% of Jeanty’s runs ended in either a first down or a touchdown. 

Some are going to assume that Jeanty isn’t much of a receiver because he caught only 23 dump-offs with three drops in 2024. Pay that no mind. Boise State radically changed Jeanty’s usage last season in an attempt to challenge Sanders’ record and get Jeanty to New York for the Heisman ceremony – his pass-game work from 2023 was directly funneled into carries in 2024.

In 2023, 65 of Jeanty’s 516 offensive snaps came in the slot or out wide. Recall – Jeanty was an all-district receiver as a junior in Texas’ highest level of high school football. Jeanty caught 44-of-48 targets in 2023 for 578 yards and five TD – with zero drops – good for an elite-elite 91.6 PFF receiving grade. 

The only area of Jeanty’s game that I can nitpick is his pass-pro. All the feel that he has as a runner and receiver go out the window in this phase. He seems to be a little slow to denote danger, and, while he’s willing to scrap, his technique is poor. He doesn’t always square a power base under him leading up to contact, and he’s usually late to punch, allowing the defender to touch him first and dictate the dance.

I could care less. If I’m lucky enough to have Ashton Jeanty on my team, he’s going to be out running routes when we’re passing the ball. 

Jeanty is the best running back prospect to enter the NFL since Saquon Barkley. He will be a star from Day 1.