Staving off an upset, Ashton Jeanty propels Boise State to win during a Heisman drive

LARAMIE, Wyo. (Idaho Statesman) — Saturday night in a mostly empty gym in Laramie, Wyoming, Boise State head coach Spencer Danielson declared that junior running back Ashton Jeanty has had “countless Heisman moments this season.”

He’s not wrong.

There’s the six-touchdown game against Georgia Southern in the opener. The 70-yard touchdown run he ripped off against Oregon a week later. The three-touchdown, 209-yard performance against Nevada earlier this month, a game the Broncos won 28-21. The battle at UNLV when he took a pounding on run after run, injured his left arm, and still rushed for 128 yards and the game-winning TD.

But against Wyoming on Saturday night, banged up and suffering after a third-quarter, lower-body injury that forced him to miss a couple of series, Jeanty may have had his most impressive series yet, ripping off three long runs and serving as a vital decoy on pass plays.

And it won Boise State the game, 17-13, when 23-point underdog Wyoming was on the verge of pulling off a major upset.

“It’s Ashton Jeanty. When he has the ball, we know he’s able to do something incredible,” redshirt senior wide receiver Latrell Caples said. No. 12 Boise State (10-1, 7-0 Mountain West) came in as a huge favorite over Wyoming (2-9, 2-5), which is having its worst season in a decade, but it was mostly an ugly night for the Broncos.

It got even uglier in the third quarter when Jeanty exited the game and headed toward the pop-up medical tent on the sideline. At the time, the score was 10-10 midway through the third quarter, and Boise State had scored just three points across its six most recent drives.

He missed the rest of that possession and then sat out the Broncos’ entire next drive, which resulted in seven plays and a punt.

Then Wyoming put together a field-goal drive to take a 13-10 lead and put Boise State in a rare fourth-quarter deficit — and in danger of suffering a big fall in reputation and the college football rankings.

“Stay in the fight. Stay in the moment,” Danielson was telling his team. Part of that was getting Jeanty back into the game. If he had not returned, the Broncos could have been forced to head back to Boise with a different College Football Playoff outlook.

After an incompletion from redshirt sophomore quarterback Maddux Madsen, the Broncos resorted to their tried-and-tested offensive method: Just hand it to Jeanty.

Jeanty carried the ball on the next two plays, ripping off runs of 15 and 20 yards to move the ball to the Wyoming 40. With the Cowboys’ attention on Jeanty, Madsen threw a 14-yard pass to Prince Strachan on the next play. Two plays later, Jeanty broke off another 15-yard run to make it first-and-goal. Jeanty then ran for 2 yards and went to the sideline for a rest, allowing sophomore running back Jambres Dubar to cap the drive with a 2-yard touchdown run and 17-13 lead.

When all was said and done, Jeanty was responsible for 53 yards on the 75-yard game-winning drive.

“It kind of felt like we were back in rhythm,” Caples said. “We missed those from Ashton, those long runs straight out the gate.” Jeanty finished the night with 169 rushing yards on just 19 carries, good for 8.9 yards per carry. He also scored the only other Broncos TD, bursting through a hole at the line of scrimmage in the first quarter and taking off for a 61-yard score.

Jeanty, whose games in a Boise State jersey are quickly dwindling, hit a couple of landmarks on Saturday night in his impressive performance. He set the school record for 100-yard rushing games in a season (11) — yes, he’s done it every game — and became the first running back at the FBS level to reach 2,000 yards in a single season since 2019.

He also became the first FBS player to have 125-plus rushing yards in each of the first 11 games of a season since Troy Davis did so for Iowa State in 1996.

This all came a week after Jeanty set the Boise State school record for most rushing yards in a season. He leads the nation with 2,062 rushing yards and 27 touchdowns on the ground.

“There are countless Heisman moments this season by Ashton, starting from game one to game 11,” Danielson said. “That’s why I tell people: Watch the film. Watch the film. Just watch it.”