Ashton Jeanty: Boise State Legend, Raiders Running Back, and What Comes Next

Ashton Jeanty: From Boise State Record-Breaker to Las Vegas Raiders Star

Who Is Ashton Jeanty?

Ashton Jeanty is a running back for the Las Vegas Raiders, selected sixth overall in the 2025 NFL Draft out of Boise State. He was born December 2, 2003, in Jacksonville, Florida, stands 5-foot-8, and weighs 208 pounds. His father, Harry Jeanty, served as a U.S. naval officer, which is why Ashton started high school at Naples Middle/High School in Italy before finishing at Lone Star High School in Frisco, Texas. He plays at the same weight class as a lot of slot receivers. That tells you something about how he runs.

At Lone Star, he didn’t just play running back. He lined up at wide receiver, defensive end, outside linebacker, and safety – accumulating 1,843 rushing yards on 229 carries his senior season, plus 810 receiving yards, with 41 total touchdowns. Three sports: football, basketball, track. Boise State got him over offers from Kansas, California, and others. He committed as a four-star recruit per 247Sports.

Three Seasons at Boise State: How a Record Gets Built

In 2022, Jeanty shared carries with George Holani as a true freshman. Fourteen games, two starts, 821 rushing yards on 156 carries, seven touchdowns. Nothing about that stat line predicts what followed. He also flashed in the Frisco Bowl that December – 178 yards and a score in a 35–32 win over North Texas.

His sophomore year saw Holani still splitting time with him, but Jeanty led the team in rushing with 1,347 yards and 14 touchdowns. He made First Team All-Mountain West. Caught the ball better too – 43 receptions for 569 yards at 13.2 yards per catch. By the end of 2023, the question wasn’t whether Jeanty could be a workhorse. It was whether Boise State’s schedule was good enough to put him in Heisman conversations.

Then 2024 happened.

Week 1 against Georgia Southern: 267 rushing yards, six touchdowns. That broke a 46-year-old Boise State single-game record and tied the Paulson Stadium record. He hit 100 yards in all 14 games the Broncos played that year – an FBS record that still stands. Eight of those games he went past 200. He led the country with 374 carries, 2,601 rushing yards, and finished second in rushing touchdowns with 29. His 7.0 yards per carry. The 2,601 yards is the second-highest single-season total in FBS history, behind Barry Sanders’ 2,628 at Oklahoma State in 1988.

He forced 164 missed tackles in 2024 alone. Accumulated 1,970 yards after contact. Won the Maxwell Award, the Doak Walker Award, the Bobby Bowden Trophy, and the Earl Campbell Tyler Rose Award. Finished runner-up in Heisman voting to Travis Hunter, Colorado’s two-way star who caught 92 passes for 1,152 yards and 14 touchdowns as a receiver while also intercepting four passes as a cornerback. A fair outcome, probably. In any other year, Jeanty wins it going away.

Boise State finished 12-2, won the Mountain West title, and made the College Football Playoff for the first time in program history. His career totals at departure: 750 carries, 4,769 rushing yards, 56 total touchdowns, and every major rushing record in program history – yards per carry (6.36), 100-yard games (22), 200-yard games (8).

The 2025 NFL Draft and What the Raiders Were Thinking

Las Vegas took Jeanty with the sixth pick on April 24, 2025, making him the first running back drafted within the top six picks since Saquon Barkley went second overall to the Giants in 2018. The fully guaranteed four-year rookie contract came in at $35.9 million. He is the second-highest-paid running back on a rookie deal at the time of signing.

The Raiders were 32nd in rushing yards per game in 2024, averaging 79.8. They brought in veteran Raheem Mostert – who had led the NFL with 18 rushing touchdowns in 2023 – as a complementary piece. Pete Carroll, hired as head coach after Antonio Pierce was let go, built his identity around running the ball at Washington and Seattle for two decades. The plan was obvious. What happened next was not.

Jeanty’s Rookie NFL Season: The Good, the Frustrating, and the Context That Matters

His NFL debut against the Patriots: two yards per carry. He averaged 3.7 yards per carry for the full season – 266 carries, 975 rushing yards, five rushing touchdowns. He also caught 55 passes on 73 targets for 346 yards and five receiving scores. Per PFF, he earned a 70.4 overall grade, ranking 34th among 55 qualified running backs. His rushing grade of 73.1 also ranked 34th.

Those numbers look underwhelming for a sixth overall pick. They probably are. But here’s the part that doesn’t fit cleanly: the Raiders finished dead last in the NFL in rushing yards per game at 70.8 – worse than their 2024 number, which was already worst in the league. Jeanty led all NFL rookies in rushing yards, scrimmage yards (1,321), and became the fifth player in NFL history to score five rushing and five receiving touchdowns in his rookie season. All of that while being hit behind the line of scrimmage at the highest tackle-for-loss percentage among running backs with 100 or more carries, per Next Gen Stats. The team’s rushing EPA per attempt was -0.26, worst in the NFL by a wide margin.

He had two different offensive playcallers. The Raiders went 3-14. They were trailing in most games, which kills run game usage by design. Interim OC Greg Olson said after Week 15 – a 31-0 loss to Philadelphia – “obviously, not a lot of space runs for him so far this season.” That’s a charitable description of an offensive line that routinely lost at the point of attack.

Week 4 against Chicago is the reference point for what Jeanty can do when given functional blocking. He broke a tackle in the backfield, bounced outside, and took a 64-yard touchdown down the left sideline. Finished that game with 155 total yards and three touchdowns. Over his final seven regular-season games, he carried 117 times for 421 yards including a 128-yard effort against Houston – a 3.6 YPC stretch, still not eye-popping, but showing genuine late-season improvement as the game slowed down for him.

What bothers me about most takes on his rookie year is that they compare his stat line to other top-six picks without adjusting for situation. Breece Hall went to a Jets team that reached the playoffs in 2024 on the back of his running. Bijan Robinson had a Pro Bowl offensive line in Atlanta. Jeanty’s offensive line ranked, per PFF run blocking grade, among the worst units in the league. More than half of his rushing yards came after contact – meaning the blocking failed and he still gained yards.

Running Style: What 5-Foot-8 Can Actually Do

The consistent description from scouts and coaches is contact balance. At 5-8 with a low center of gravity, defenders have trouble hitting him squarely – he tends to absorb hits and spin or bounce rather than go down. He forced 61 missed tackles as an NFL rookie. That number doesn’t tell you how he does it, but watch the Bears game and it becomes clear: he runs into contact and redirects through it rather than away from it.

His pass-catching is already legitimate. Seventy-three targets as a rookie, 55 receptions – a 75.3 percent catch rate. Kubiak has compared his intended usage to Christian McCaffrey, who caught at least 600 receiving yards in six of nine NFL seasons, including 1,005 in 2019. When Kubiak ran the offense in New Orleans in 2024, Alvin Kamara averaged six targets per game. Jeanty is already watching film of both McCaffrey and Kenneth Walker III, who rushed for 1,075 yards on 221 carries under Kubiak with the Seahawks.

“I want to help the team win as much as I can, and if I don’t have to, I don’t want to come off the field,” Jeanty said at OTAs in May 2026. That’s the kind of thing players say, but the film from late 2025 at least supports the self-assessment.

Year 2 in Las Vegas: What Actually Changes in 2026

Pete Carroll is gone. Klint Kubiak – previously Seattle’s offensive coordinator – is now the Raiders’ head coach. His offense runs wide zone, which requires mobile, patient runners who can read cutback lanes. That describes Jeanty precisely.

The offensive line looks meaningfully different. Left tackle Kolton Miller, who missed most of 2025 with a season-ending injury, is back. Right guard Jackson Powers-Johnson, also lost to injury last year, returns. The Raiders signed center Tyler Linderbaum in free agency – a three-time Pro Bowl selection. Rick Dennison replaced Brennan Carroll as offensive line coach. Dennison has four Super Bowl rings as a coach and deep experience in the zone-run system that Kubiak runs.

Kubiak told reporters at OTAs: “We want to put a lot of pressure on Ashton. The next guy that steps up, whoever that may be, that’s going to be seen here in practice, OTAs and training camp, but we think we should continue to challenge Ashton and get more out of him.” The Raiders also drafted Arkansas running back Mike Washington Jr. in the 2026 draft – the fastest back at the combine with a 4.33 forty – but Kubiak framed that as complementary, not competitive.

Whether any of this produces the 1,300-plus-yard season Jeanty was supposed to have in 2025 depends heavily on whether the rebuilt offensive line actually blocks better. Walker’s 1,075-yard Seahawks season is the comparable – same scheme, similar back profile. That’s the floor the Raiders are building toward.

Ashton Jeanty Career Statistics

College career at Boise State (2022–2024):

NFL career with the Las Vegas Raiders:

He led all NFL rookies in rushing yards in 2025. He was also the fifth player in league history to score five rushing and five receiving touchdowns in his first season.