If Hayden Hatten ran a funeral home, you can imagine, the reviews would be horrible. Hatten is good at putting people (cornerbacks, mostly) in coffins. The problem is that he then likes to dance on them too.
One of Idaho’s best gimmicks is running tight formations to isolate its top receiver, and with three minutes, 44 seconds left in the second quarter of the Vandals’ game against Eastern Washington at the Kibbie Dome earlier this month, it was Demetrious Crosby Jr.’s turn to line up across from Hatten, all alone on the left side of the field. Just as the announcer was reminding viewers to watch out for Hatten, he burst off the line, eating up Crosby’s 8-yard cushion.
Idaho freshman quarterback Gevani McCoy let go of the ball before Hatten even made the second break of his out-and-up route, and by the time the camera caught back up to the play, he’d high-pointed the ball in the back corner of the end zone with Crosby sprawling to the ground in an ineffective effort to stop the inevitability.
It was Hatten’s 12th touchdown in his last five games, seventh in the last four quarters he’d played and fourth in that game alone. And as he bounced back to his feet, he held up two fingers on each hand, smashed them together and held up the result: four fingers, four touchdowns.
“You’ve got to be careful not to get flagged, right? You don’t want to draw the refs’ attention too much,” Hatten said. “So you have to do it in little subtle ways, but yeah, we work hard all year to get to perform on a big stage and so when you excel at it, I don’t see any problem in soaking it in.”
Hatten hasn’t just been the most unguardable receiver in the country for the last two months. Cool, confident and, more than anything, fun, he’s also the perfect avatar for an Idaho team that’s found its mojo in head coach Jason Eck’s first year.
He added two more touchdowns in a 13-catch, 126-yard effort despite a disappointing loss to UC Davis the week after the Eastern Washington game. At the end of the regular season (Idaho is one of five Big Sky Conference teams going to the FCS playoffs), Hatten leads the conference in catches (74), yards per game (100 – only three other players are even above 80, including his teammate Jermaine Jackson in second place at 85.3) and, obviously, touchdowns (15 after having none in his first three games). Only Weber State’s Ty MacPherson reached double digits with 10 TDs.
Montana fans found out just how good he is a month ago, when Hatten had nine catches for 149 yards and two touchdowns to lead the Vandals to a 30-23 win at Washington-Grizzly Stadium. He also celebrated his second score, a 43-yarder he snatched off the top of Corbin Walker’s head, by busting out Cristiano Ronaldo’s iconic celebration in front of the north end zone, and then said about the win in the postgame press conference, “I knew it was going to happen.”
“(Washington-Grizzly) has to be my favorite stadium I’ve ever played in, just based off the atmosphere and everything,” Hatten said. “I love how passionate the fans are there. … That’s why you play the game, right, to go in and prove people wrong and show out and have fun in an environment like that.”
That belief in himself and his team is the perfect mirror of his head coach, who’s engineered one of the biggest turnarounds in the country.
Fair or not, Paul Petrino was quickly acquiring a reputation as the Jeff Fisher of the FCS – in the three full seasons since the Vandals dropped back down to the Big Sky Conference, they’d finished 3-5 in conference play every year, and either 4-7 or 5-7 overall.
Eck, who looks like a side character from a forgotten season of Cheers and has the press-conference demeanor of a golden retriever, led the Vandals to a 7-4 record that included six Big Sky wins and the program’s first FCS playoff berth since bolting from then-Division I-AA following the 1995 season.
In his first game coaching Idaho, the former South Dakota State offensive coordinator went for it seven times on fourth down against Washington State and nearly pulled the upset over the Cougars, 24-17.
In the “upset” over Montana, Eck called for an onside kick to start the second half, then chortled after the game, “Everyone told me that we wanted to have the ball to start the second half, so that was the only way to get it.”
Hatten meshes perfectly with Eck’s gambling, “screw it, let’s try it” style – you can almost hear the coach whispering that to himself on the sideline every time he sees Hatten matched up one-on-one.
Hatten is a physical receiver, adept at using his body to either out-jump defensive backs for contested catches, like he did to Crosby and Walker, or seal them off on slants by the goal line, like he did on a couple of his three second-half touchdowns against Sacramento State. He also has great hands and perhaps the longest reel of highlight catches of anybody in the league. After a whirling, leaping, one-handed catch in the side of the end zone earlier this year against Portland State – a fade this time against one-on-one coverage by the goal line – he whipped out another iconic athlete’s famous celebration: Michael Jordan’s shrug.
The Vandals also happen to have the perfect recipe for continuing to get Hatten in one-on-one situations – a great receiver on the other side in Jackson, a very accurate quarterback in McCoy and an effective running game with Roshaun Johnson and freshman Anthony Woods.
“I do kind of like, in man-to-man coverage, one-on-one, Hatten against everybody we play,” Eck said after the Eastern Washington game. “There’s nobody we back down from there.” Eck can barely contain his glee while he’s talking about this, trying not to smile.
Hayden is now part of a trifecta of Hattens at Idaho that includes his twin brother and linebacker Hogan and their cousin Jack, a 6-foot-6 redshirt freshman guard on the basketball team. Their house is a magnet for other Vandal athletes on campus (and, in fact, where the inspiration for the Ronaldo celebration comes from – the trio plays a lot of FIFA. Hayden’s go-to teams: France and Liverpool).
That they ended up at Idaho at all, though, is a bit of an upset. Originally, their path out of Scottsdale, Arizona, where the twins’ dad runs a branch of Josten’s, the cap-and-cape company, and their mom runs a Chick-Fil-A franchise, seemed to point towards the Ivy League. Hayden is studying economics with plans to go into the family business, and the brothers knew that they were going to the same school so that their parents could see them both play at the same time.
An initial commitment to Brown fell through when the coaching staff was fired, and Idaho was one of the few schools to offer both twins a scholarship. In fact, the Vandals were the only Big Sky team to offer Hayden at all (“I was kind of taken aback when I couldn’t get NAU,” he said).
He made the Lumberjacks regret that early, catching the first two touchdowns of his career against NAU in the final game of his freshman season in 2019 after appearing in every game that season.
Hatten was second in the Big Sky with 43 receptions in the 2021 spring season and was set for a breakout year with 12 catches, 200 yards and three touchdowns in the first two games of 2021 before hurting his shoulder and missing the rest of the year.
Doing his best work in the under-the-radar spring season and the unfortunate timing of the injury kept Hatten a little bit of a surprise for people who weren’t watching Idaho closely.
Nobody outside of Moscow would have predicted that the receiver with the most touchdowns in the country this year would have had under 70 career catches entering the season. Nobody outside of Moscow would have guessed that the Vandals would be flirting with a top-10 spot at any point in the season either.
But after a slow start to the season (for all of his outstanding stats, Hatten’s most unique statline of the year might be this – he had 13 yards on six catches in the season opener at Washington State), Hatten and the Vandals are now rolling, and neither looks inclined to shy away from the new spotlight.
“I just think the most important thing in college football is believing you’re gonna win, and having an entire team’s culture change to believing you’re gonna win is important,” Hatten said. “I’m a very confident individual, I believe in myself and being surrounded with the people I’m surrounded by, it definitely helps me personally. … I think anybody who’s been here and saw it firsthand, how everybody just kind of flipped and really has belief in the program…it’s an exciting time to be a Vandal.”
