I speculated back in September that Ashton Jeanty might be on pace to become the best Boise State running back ever (which is saying something considering their history of producing Pro Bowl-level starters and quality NFL contributors at the position), and he finished his sophomore season by being named the Mountain West’s Offensive Player of the Year and -- more importantly -- earning second-team honors on my fake All-America squad. His prodigious production put him in position for those distinctions, but we know that the players who put up the biggest numbers at the college level aren’t necessarily going to be the same guys who we want on our fantasy teams as pros. Let’s review Jeanty’s performance as an underclassman -- covering both his freshman and sophomore seasons -- from a field-level view and decide exactly how excited we should be to select him in rookie drafts next spring:

Through two seasons and nearly 400 carries, Jeanty has not been particularly impressive from an efficiency standpoint relative to most eventual NFL draftees. His career mark in Box-Adjusted Efficiency Rating is a positive one, but barely so, and while it lands in the same range as those for past prospects like Damien Harris, JK Dobbins, and Jahmyr Gibbs, Jeanty does not have the excuse of having played with elite-level college talents or future NFL contributors. With fifth-year man George Holani as his primary touch competition, Jeanty’s team-relative efficiency shows him to be slightly more effective on a per-carry basis than a good but not great group of backfield teammates. That’s not typically a recipe for success at the next level, but I think elements of the soon-to-be junior’s rushing profile should instill a bit more confidence in his ability to run as a pro than might be immediately apparent.

For one, Jeanty improved fairly substantially from 2022 to 2023. He was a relatively large part of the Boise State offense as a freshman, handling 170 touches and posting a 17.0% Dominator Rating that lands in the 85th percentile among all first-year college runners going back to 2009, but his 96.4% BAE Rating and -2.0% Relative Success Rate reveal that he was offering slightly less on a per-attempt basis than were Holani and the other Bronco backs. This season, despite having left the Wyoming game early with an injury, Jeanty posted a 38.1% Dominator Rating (the fourth-highest mark for any Group of Five sophomore in the last fifteen years) and brought his BAE Rating and RSR numbers up to 109.8% and 5.9%, respectively. That first number is still not great (it’s a 25th-percentile figure among eventual NFL backs), but the second is actively good and lands in the 76th percentile. Jeanty hasn’t been an incredibly efficient runner, but he’s adding value via consistent, chain-moving output, is producing explosive plays at a high clip, and is breaking a ton of tackles. Those three things satisfy much of what I want to see from my running back prospects, and when you consider Jeanty’s relatively low Breakaway Conversion Rate, it makes some sense that his BAE Rating doesn’t completely reflect how effective he’s been on the ground. He’s only gained 27.1% of his total rushing yards beyond ten yards of the line of scrimmage thus far in his career, and while we’d obviously prefer him to also be a great open field runner, the lack of such production shouldn’t be an indictment on his overall skillset. Really, it contributes to making Jeanty’s rushing profile look very Javonte Williams-ish, as the former North Carolina runner’s college numbers show:

The real appeal with Jeanty, however, is that he possesses a trump card that Williams and most other tackle-breaking fiends do not: legitimate down-field pass-catching ability. In the same way that Rachaad White is able to lead an NFL backfield and produce RB1-level fantasy numbers despite being a subpar professional rusher (he ranks in the bottom half of 44 qualifying backs in positive RYOE rate and in the bottom-ten of that group in RYOE per attempt), Jeanty’s receiving skills have the potential to cover up a lot of sins for him at the next level.

You could make a decent argument that Jeanty is the best receiving back we’ve seen in all of college football in the last half decade. Of the 100 collegiate runners who ran at least 100 routes this season, Jeanty’s average of 3.98 yards per route run (according to Sports Info Solutions) is easily the best. He finished the year with a 0.95-yard lead over second place, a massive disparity that matches the lead that TreVeyon Henderson’s 12th-place mark of 2.01 yards has over the country’s 68th-most efficient receiving back. That YPRR average is also the highest mark for any such back since SIS started tracking the stat back in 2018, with Jahmyr Gibbs, Travis Etienne, and Deuce Vaughn the only guys who have come within even half a yard of it in a single season during that time-frame.

Jeanty also isn’t dependent on a bunch of YAC-fueled dump-offs for that receiving production. He was used that way quite a bit this year, with a -0.9-yard aDOT and an average of 14.1 yards after the catch (the second-highest mark among 20+ target runners), but Jeanty also flexed 87th-percentile Route Diversity and was targeted on advanced route types 43.9% more often on a per-route basis than would be expected based on nation-wide targets per route run data. Additionally, he has lined up out wide or in the slot on nearly 15% of his career passing-down snaps (a 76th-percentile mark) and was targeted an average of 1.4 yards downfield on 77 routes and 16 targets as a true freshman. Despite that advanced usage, Jeanty has caught 89.6% of his career targets (and 95% of those targets that SIS has deemed “catchable”), a higher rate than for all but eleven running backs in the last eight draft classes. There’s not a lot of runners who can make plays like this:

All things considered, Jeanty is a rare talent. Historical weight gain patterns indicate that he’s likely to measure in at 5’8 ⅞” and 211 pounds during his eventual pre-Draft process, giving him a dense frame and near-workhorse size to go with speed that will probably end up in the mid-4.5 range (based on high school 100-meter dash times and the conversion work of @bigWRguy). He’s not Bijan Robinson, but as a tackle-breaking machine with good size and legitimate down-field receiving chops, Jeanty is kind of the Group of Five version of the Texas legend that many considered a generational prospect last offseason. The other guys I’d comp him to (from various angles) are Javonte Williams, Maurice Jones-Drew, Rachaad White, Kareem Hunt, and David Johnson, and we’re not allowed to be surprised when Jeanty is producing like an RB1 in fantasy in a couple years. His three-down skill-set makes him a legitimate contender for the best player in what looks to be a good 2025 running back class.