On Saturday night, Colorado’s Travis Hunter hoisted the Heisman Trophy, gave a moving speech in front of an assembled group of previous winners and took the 45-pound cast bronze statue back with him to the Mountain Time Zone.
The player he narrowly beat for the honor believes it should have been him that got to do all of that.
Boise State running back Ashton Jeanty, the Heisman runner-up, said to reporters after the ceremony that he ‘should’ve walked away’ with college football’s most prestigious individual award.
“Kudos to Travis for winning, but yeah, it’s simple as that,” he said. “Work harder, go harder.”
In virtually any other year, one in which he didn’t have to vie for the trophy against someone who had the historical distinction of being both one of the country’s best cornerbacks and best wide receivers, Jeanty would have likely secured the award.
Entering Boise State’s College Football Playoff game against either Penn State or SMU, Jeanty has rushed for 2,497 yards and 29 touchdowns while averaging 7.3 yards per carry. His rushing total is the fourth-highest in FBS history, putting him 131 yards behind Barry Sanders’ single-season record from 1988. Sanders, who won the Heisman that season, reached that mark in just 11 games.
Jeanty did so while carrying the Broncos to a 12-1 record, a Mountain West Conference championship and a first-round bye in the upcoming playoff.
Hunter earned 552 first-place votes, to Jeanty’s 309, and finished with 2,231 total points, putting him just ahead of Jeanty’s 2,017. No other player had more than 516 points. It was the closest Heisman vote since 2009.
Though it never escalated to a full-on feud, Jeanty and Hunter did engage in some back-and-forths over the course of the 2024 season as their Heisman candidacies were debated against one another.
In October, Hunter minimized Jeanty’s production during a podcast interview with former Heisman winner Robert Griffin III, saying that ‘it’s not like we haven’t seen a good running back that is good’ in contrast to himself, a rare player in the modern era who excels on both offense and defense.
Jeanty largely took the high road, commending Hunter’s season and noting he was “just speaking his opinion” while defending his own statistical output.
‘For me, what I’ve been doing hasn’t been done in 36, 37 years, so that’s something special,’ Jeanty said. ‘If I keep that up and break a record that’s been around for 36 years, I feel like you can’t really compete with that.”
With Jeanty’s second-place finish, a running back hasn’t won the Heisman since Derrick Henry in 2015. A position that used to dominate the award has captured it just three times since 2000.