Billy Napier gives humorous reaction to recruiting Hayden Hansen

First-year Florida head coach Billy Napier shared his thoughts on the 2022 recruiting class, including three-star tight end Hayden Hansen, during his National Signing Day press conference this week. After recruiting the unheralded Texas native at Louisiana, he extended an offer and landed the player.

Billy Napier spoke about Hayden Hansen, sharing a humorous story about the time he saw the No. 109 ranked tight end play. He could not believe his eyes.

“Hayden is a very impressive player,” said Napier. “6-foot-6 3/4, he weighed 256-pounds on the visit. This guy is a former quarterback and a guy who really blew me away when he came and did a private workout for us at Louisiana. I thought I was on reality tv or something, because this guy doesn’t have the opportunities that maybe I would think he would have.

“I think a little bit of that it a result of him playing quarterback, a couple games into his junior year they moved him to tight end. He kind of buys into that, film wasn’t great as a junior and he would tell you that. But I think he took a big step forward and he ran 4.79 and 4.81 for us at UL. This is a big man with hands that I think his ceiling is really, really high. So you pair that with the family background, kind of a blue collar, really bright kid. He lives probably an hour and a half west of Dallas in West Texas, so you’ve got to kind of be intentional about getting there. … I think it’s one of the better evaluations in the class in my opinion.”

Billy Napier on tight ends

With the addition of Hayden Hansen, along with four-star Florida native Tony Livingston, Florida has bolstered a position of need. Also on the roster, returning contributor Keon Zipperer is joined by several others who have been evaluated by the staff in recent weeks.

Billy Napier and his staff spoke about the use of 12 personnel, which uses one running back and two tight ends. The formation was a calling card of their Louisiana offense.

“Yeah, no question,” said Napier. “We’ve got a good group on campus, and I think we’ve got a couple really good additions here in this class. I think it’s pretty well documented the type of system that we ran at the prior stop. We’ll continue with that philosophy and certainly tight ends will be a big piece of the puzzle in terms of presenting a lot of variables to the defense. The more versatile those players are, the more variables we can present and more difficult we can be to defend.”