Penn State did all of college football a service by preserving Barry Sanders’ single-season rushing record

Heisman Trophy runner-up Ashton Jeanty entered the Fiesta Bowl College Football Playoff quarterfinal against Penn State just 131 yards shy of Barry Sanders’ all-time single-season FBS rushing record. It felt preordained that the Boise State running back would eclipse Sanders’s total on New Year’s Eve, but the Nittany Lion’s defense limited him to just 104 yards on a whopping 30 carries, by far his worst performance of the season. 

Jeanty is an all-time great running back having an all-time great season, but Penn State did college football history a service by preserving Sanders’ record. Sanders racked up his 2,628 yards in just 11 games, while Jeanty needed 14 to hit 2,601, and the real record is 2,850 if you include Sanders’s 222 yards and five touchdowns against Wyoming in the 1988 Holiday Bowl. The NCAA idiotically refuses to retroactively acknowledge his bowl stats because they were not officially included in season totals as they are now. 

Jeanty’s season was remarkable, but he didn’t deserve the record, especially not with the additional games he needed to reach a mark that should be 222 yards higher. His place in history gets even more tenuous when you interrogate the caliber of defenses that Boise State faced on its way to a Mountain West Championship in 2024. The Broncos faced seven defenses that ranked outside the top 100 in the nation in EPA/rush, an eighth that ranked 97th, and that doesn’t include Jeanty’s 127 yards against FCS Portland State. 

If you’re interested in the total number of carries needed to reach their respective totals, Jeanty toted the rock 374 times, averaging 7.0 yards per carry to Sanders’s 344 attempts and 7.6-yard average. Barry Sanders's 1988 season deserves to be remembered as the greatest of all-time by a college football running back while Jeanty belongs on the tier below, alongside Melvin Gordon, Kevin Smith, Marcus Allen, and Rashaad Penny. And the historical significance of Penn State’s performance was not lost on one of its most veteran players. 

Sanders would not have complained about losing the record to a player who had three extra games and 30 more carries, but I would have, and thanks to the Penn State defense, I don’t have to.