Nico Iamaleava set the college football transfer portal ablaze when he announced his decision to leave the Tennessee Volunteers. It’s not that high-profile players haven’t hit the portal before, but it was the way it happened.
Iamaleava represented a prized recruiting win for Josh Heupel and his staff and was part of the reason Tennessee made the inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff last season. While perhaps not a bona fide superstar, Iamaleava was a high-level starting SEC quarterback.
Tennessee and the young quarterback’s “representation” were reportedly in a NIL dispute when Iamaleava “held out” of a team practice and meeting, which caused the Vols to decide to move on. Of course, Iamaleava’s side of the story is that he wanted to move on from the Vols, and new reporting from Chris Low, Max Olson and Adam Rittenberg of ESPN backs that up.
At the very least, their in-depth look at what happened between Tennessee and its former starting quarterback suggests that Iamaleava’s camp was looking for an increase in NIL money from $2.4 million in 2025 to around $4 million. The quarterback’s representatives reached out to Tennessee’s NIL collective on Dec. 28, and at that point, per the ESPN report, Iamaleava wasn’t talking to the coaching staff or returning their phone calls.
In fact, according to the report, Tennessee believes that Iamaleava was already shopping at that point, and he had several big-time programs in mind.
“Tennessee sources say they believe the Iamaleavas reached out to several schools, including Miami, Ole Miss and Oregon, to gauge interest. Tennessee coach Josh Heupel was seemingly able to smooth things over and keep Nico on board for 2025, but the quarterback did not receive a new deal or more money,” wrote ESPN’s team of reporters.
Iamaleava entered the transfer portal and ended up with UCLA, where ESPN sources say he’ll be making less in NIL money than what he was at Tennessee. On the other side of things, new UCLA quarterback Joey Aguilar hit the portal when Iamaleava signed because he was expecting to be the new starting quarterback.
Now he’s found himself at Tennessee, where he’s likely to be Iamaleava’s replacement for Heupel and the Volunteers.
It’s a wild saga that could almost serve as a warning against the wild west nature of the NIL and transfer portal era. No matter how it went down, though, clearly the idea of leaving Tennessee was in Iamaleava’s mind far before this spring.
