Pros in College Ball? You Got It.

And it certainly does suck

Thanks for reading The Dope.

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Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: High-profile quarterback Jut Jawline is on a good team with a good contract. But Jut decides that the contract isn’t as sweet as it could be. The team thinks things are pretty fair — and after all, Jut, you and your people negotiated and signed that deal.

Unable to force a free upgrade to a bigger payday, Jut decides to withhold his services.

At this point, the team — Eagles, Broncos, Rams, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter that much — has a few alternatives, all of which stink. The club can 1.) renegotiate with the Jawster, in which case it sends a clear message to anyone paying attention that it can be bullied into submission; 2.) continue its preseason/season while the player holds out, hoping that the passage of time might eventually produce a detente; or 3.) cut its losses, literally, by saying goodbye to good old Jut — and, in the process, actively get worse as a team.

I really needn’t ask about this scenario, because I know that you’ve all heard it before. You follow sports, after all. You’ve seen athletes try to use the power of the holdout to grind a better deal, or get themselves traded, or even get themselves released so that they’re free to sell to some other higher bidder.

In fact, this just happened to Tennessee. But before you go looking for the Titans QB who’s all up in his feels about his suddenly not-good-enough contract, let me save you some time.

It’s not the Titans. It’s the Volunteers.

What I’ve described is a professional situation, sure. But it occurred to the state’s biggest college program just last week.

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Normally, this would be the point at which some snark enters into our conversation, just to keep things light. I can’t go there on this one. Makes me sad.

College football, in particular, is a wasteland right now. What happened at Tennessee last week is really only the opening act of the play that we are going to see performed on campuses across the country, as players who choose their destinations based on booster payment plans NIL money decide midstream that the deal isn’t as great as they think they can cut elsewhere, and they demand renegotiation.

Because the NCAA set all the dumpsters on fire in its own parking lot via its blatant mishandling of this entire issue, the system you see is the system we’ve got. Players get paid to perform for a university; there isn’t really any sort of plan for how it all works; schools think they have a commitment from players but they can’t really enforce it; and everybody is apparently free to either renege on the deals, fail to actually pay out what they said they would, or just everybody up and leave for greener pastures after each and every college season.

(Official disclaimer: I am completely in favor of college athletes getting paid. We’re talking about the delivery system, not the fact.)

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One way to simplify the situation, of course, would be to actually sign those players to contracts, which are legally enforceable. The problem: To do that, schools would have to make the athletes paid employees of the university system, and they are absolutely terrified of what comes with that: salaries, benefits, collective bargaining, etc.

So this is what we’re left with. It simply and completely sucks.

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Here’s what happened at the University of Tennessee: The Vols a few years recruited a high-school QB from Southern California named Nico Iamaleava. Iamaleava was a five-star prospect, and in 2022 he signed an $8 million NIL deal — that’s name, image and likeness, which college athletes are now allowed to sell to the highest bidder — to attend Tennessee. At the time, that sum re-set the NIL market for football players.

Two seasons in, Nico decided the deal wasn’t good enough. According to multiple reports, Iamaleava and his people tried to force a new NIL agreement with Spyre Sports, the primary NIL collective at Tennessee. A standoff ensued, and last week Nico simply staged a holdout. Work stoppage. Strike. Whatever you wish to call it.

He skipped the team’s practice on Friday, which apparently caught the Tennessee coaching staff off guard, and he wasn’t going to show up for the spring game on Saturday either. At that point, the team said it was moving on from Iamaleava; this announcement occurred at about the same time that Nico and his people made it known that he will enter the NCAA’s transfer portal when it opens on Wednesday.

Nico was making about $2.4 million this year as part of his larger deal. He wanted something closer to $4 million per, and it’s possible he will get that somewhere else. Possible, I say. Not probable.

The reality is that Iamaleava was closer to “not bad” than “really great!” in 2024. He threw for 2,616 yards and 19 touchdowns, but 11 of those TDs came in three games, against Chattanooga, UTEP and Vanderbilt. On the SEC landscape, Nico was the No. 10-ranked quarterback in passing yards per game, and despite making the expanded College Football Playoff bracket, the Volunteers were only ninth in the conference in scoring offense.

ESPN has reported that prior to spring practice, Iamaleava’s representatives reached out to Oregon to see about adding him to its well-financed program. The Ducks passed, which may suggest that the money the quarterback seeks isn’t out there. At the same time, in the wake of Iamaleava’s decision, Tennessee’s coaches awoke this weekend to the realization that they don’t have a QB with a single game of college experience in their program.

Say, this could certainly be a lose-lose-lose-lose. (I’m counting Iamaleava, the Volunteers, the NCAA and all of us fans.) What did happen is that Iamaleava proved that even a medium-okay quarterback in a power conference can stage a holdout over money, just like the pros. That’s something — I just don’t know what.

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