New York Giants pick Jalin Hyatt in third round of NFL Draft

Jalin Hyatt has been selected by the New York Giants with the 73rd overall pick in the NFL Draft. Hyatt was picked five spots behind quarterback Hendon Hooker (Detroit Lions) and was the third former Tennessee player drafted, along with first-round pick Darnell Wright (Chicago Bears).

If last August you bet that Hyatt was going to be the 2022 Bilitnekoff winner and set a new Tennessee record for touchdown catches in a season, well, I hope you also bought a Power Ball ticket. No one could have foreseen the magical year that Hyatt was going to have for the Vols. 

Hyatt had flashed some as a freshman in Jeremy Pruitt’s first year. His speed was obvious from the very start of his career and he used that to haul in 20 catches for 276 yards and two touchdowns as a freshman. 

He had shown enough in his first year—and the Vols’ receiver room seemed barren enough—that most assumed he’d be in the rotation during Josh Heupel’s first year in 2021. 

Well, he was for a minute, but that was largely over after the first month of the season. Heupel essentially cut Hyatt from what predominantly became a three-man rotation at wideout with Cedric Tillman, Velus Jones and Javonta Payton.

Hyatt finished 2021 with just 21 catches for 226 yards and the bulk of that came early in the year. There was certainly no hint, not even an inkling of a hint, that he was about to re-write Tennessee’s record books.

We’re not suggesting that people inside the program saw Hyatt’s monster 2022 campaign coming, but there was definitely a sense that Hyatt was taking a different approach to putting in work. 

“(Jalin is a) Huge symbol of the things that we talk about paying off,” Heupel said last September of the changes he had seen in Hyatt from year one to year two. “You guys heard me talk about Theo Jackson a lot last year and how mature he was and how he competed, and it resulted in the way that he played. Jalin in the back third of last year and certainly this entire offseason is just a different individual in the way that he approaches every day and his process to getting himself to be ready play during the course of a game week and all offseason. Those examples go a lot further than me just talking about something inside of the team meeting room. Everybody inside of our program, talking about our players, can see the difference in that guy. You guys, when you see him walking down the hallway, can see the difference in him too.” 

So last August it looked like Hyatt was going to at least be a starter, which would have been a nice ‘bounce-back’ story. But Tillman was back after a 1,000 yard season and was established as Hendon Hooker’s top target. 

We all know what happened next. Hyatt got off to a decent start, scoring the Vols’ first touchdown of the season on 23 yard pass from Hooker in the opener against Ball St. 

Tillman would suffer an ankle injury in Week Three against Akron that left an enormous void at receiver for Tennessee. Suffice it to say that Hyatt stepped up to fill that void. 

He had a season for the ages, finishing with a school record 15 touchdown catches. He narrowly missed breaking Robert Meachem’s school record for receiving yards. Hyatt finished with 1267 yards just 31 yards short of Meachem’s school record. 

The season numbers look great, but no Tennessee fan will ever forget what Hyatt did against Alabama. In the defining game of the Josh Heupel era, a heart stopping 52-49 win, Hyatt decimated the Crimson Tide.

Hyatt torched the Alabama secondary for a single game school record five touchdown catches and racked up 207 yards on six receptions. 

“To be honest, I didn’t know I was going to have five touchdowns. That’s a lot,” Hyatt said at the time after destroying the Alabama secondary. “It was the looks, what they were showing us. We came to the sidelines and figured out what was going to work against their defense. There’s a lot that goes to it in terms of the game plan and how we prepare. We knew we could execute on big plays, knew that coming into the game and knew we had to in order to win this game. I’m proud of everyone in this locker room, and we’re onto the next.”