Four thoughts on the Nico Iamaleava-Tennessee- divorce

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Last week, college football saw perhaps the most dramatic breakup of the post-NIL era.

Nico Iamaleava, who you might remember as the first two million dollar man, was originally supposed to be playing in Tennessee’s spring game as the starting QB for the Vols. Instead, his camp sought to rework his contract, pushing for more money, as QB deals in 2024 began to outpace Iamaleava’s original deal.

Tenneessee said no, and now Iamaleava is off to the transfer portal. We now have our high-profile and public NIL “holdout.”

I’ve been thinking about this story for the last couple of days, reading commentary from other smart analysts and chatting with my own network. I agree that this is a massive story, not just for Tennessee’s on-the-field prospects next season (and that of whoever else gets caught up in the downstream QB-Musical-Chairs that will happen next, like UCLA or UNC)…but for the future of college athlete labor relations and roster management.

Here are four takeaways I’m mulling over from the last few days…

Throwing huge sums of money at high school QBs is always going to be risky, no matter how good they are

Nico Iamaleava was an outstanding high school QB recruit. The 247Sports Composite gave Nico a .9981 recruit rating, which wasn’t just good for five stars and the #2 recruit prospect in his class (just behind some guy named Arch Manning), but 17th all time. Iamaleava was a higher ranked QB prospect than guys like Matthew Stafford, Caleb Williams, Tim Tebow or DJ Lagway.

But let’s take another look at the QB Class of 2023:

Dante Moore struggled his freshman season at UCLA and transferred to Oregon. Jackson Arnold struggled at Oklahoma and transferred to Auburn. Malachi Nelson couldn’t secure a starting job at USC or Boise State, and is now at UTEP. Chris Vizzina is still the backup, Austin Novosad will battle with Dante Moore for the job at Oregon, Eli Holstein is at Pitt, and, well, we’ll need another newsletter to cover Jaden Rashada.

Not a whole lot of established production from this list so far, huh?

It’s not just a 2023 QB class thing though. Look at last year. Cade Klubnik has been fine, but most of the rest of the top ten have been guys that haven’t lived up to that potential yet, battled injuries and transfers, or otherwise haven’t worked out. Even the top 30 QB list of all-time has multiple guys that never became productive college players.

Recruiting rankings are generally very predictive. If you want to win national titles, you need dozens and dozens of blue-chip dudes on your roster, and a four-star guy is substantially more likely to become an NFL-caliber player than a three-star.

But while these rankings are pretty accurate in the aggregate, they can miss on individual players, and perhaps nowhere is that more evident than with QB evaluation. You can only play one QB at a time, and even if that QB has all the physical tools, there’s no guarantee the player will be the right schematic fit, be mature enough, or develop at the timeline analysts projected.

In a given year, I reckon at least 40% of the top QB recruits in a given class will fail to develop into P4 starters, if not more.

I understand why collectives and schools feel the need to make substantial financial commitments to HS recruits. An elite QB covers up a bunch of other roster problems, and it’s very difficult to win championships without elite QB play. But if you’re going to a market-setting rate, which is exactly what Tennessee did with Nico as a recruit, you better be getting market-setting results..which they clearly didn’t. And honestly, I don’t think it’s a great bet for most elite QB recruits out of high school.

The more sensible move would probably be to offer more modest, up-front payments that could balloon into seven-figure salaries once a player had secured a starting role. But this market won’t let that happen, because somebody is willing to pay big money in the hope that the player will eventually be worth it.

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Anybody telling you there’s an easy, obvious solution to these situations is probably trying to sell you something.

Without either an antitrust exemption that allows the NCAA (or other party) to actually enforce the rules on the books, or a collective bargaining agreement that establishes an antitrust exemption, there’s not much schools, or anybody else, can do to really prevent offseason holdouts or rampant roster turnover. If you’re going to pretend that compensation isn’t for athletic performance, and that these players are just regular ol’ college students, then you have to treat them like regular ol’ college students…who can transfer almost whenever they want, so long as a school will take them.

The status quo is not particularly popular with coaches, administrators, fans, and even many players. But I don’t think there’s an easy way to wrap this up.

Let’s say that tomorrow, big time college sports wakes up and decides “fine, lawyer twitter is right, we need a CBA. Let’s negotiate with the players.”

Well, there’s no entity to negotiate with. Nobody has come close to organizing a majority of even FBS football players, and since athletes aren’t currently defined as employees, they’d have limited collective bargaining abilities anyway. And even if schools decided, okay, fine, we’ll voluntarily recognize our football players as employees, then they’ll run into various state laws that limit, or outright ban, state employees from collective bargaining!

Here’s the truth. Any sort of athlete collective bargaining option probably will require assistance from the federal government to help establish who can participate in that bargaining process. Otherwise, you’ll end up with similar lawsuits, just like you will with House. Moving in this direction may very well be the best policy. But it ain’t an easy one.

Let’s say you don’t want to move in the CBA direction. Guess what? You still need Congress! This is the path the NCAA and power conference leaders have been pushing for several years…to get Congress to grant some sort of antitrust protection against constant lawsuits and the threat of employment classification. Agents, most economists and most athlete advocates generally hate this idea.

Those are the options. I don’t think there’s a plausible path that avoids constant lawsuits without government clarification and guidance.

I believe there’s a real chance the Nico story makes a government bill more likely

There are a lot of reasons why, despite tons of lobbying efforts, a federal NIL bill hasn’t gotten very far. Until recently, Congressional control was split between both parties. The ins and outs of collegiate sports governance are not a high priority or a high interest for most lawmakers and staffers, and there isn’t a single-issue political constituency that gets animated about college sports. Given everything else going on, it made sense why the bills didn’t go anywhere.

But that’s not where we are today. As I’ve written a few times, Republicans control the House, Senate and White House. Many of the most steadfast pro-organized labor voices in both chambers have either been defeated or muzzled, and a completely new political coalition in charge.

I’m not trying to be a partisan hack here, but I think it’s fair to point out that the Trump political coalition is not the same coalition of Reagan or George W. Bush. The GOP-wing in power right now is unafraid to buck conventional free market orthodoxy to either “punish” something, or to achieve a different type of policy goal. Assuming that Republicans wouldn’t support NIL reform because it would limit the earning potential of the free market is to stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the current political reality.

Did you guys not see the tariff news? Nobody in charge cares about free markets anymore.

If you wanted to mobilize lawmakers to “roll back the chaos of college sports”, what better way to galvanize disengaged policymakers than a nationwide story where almost everybody, from fans to reporters to administrators, is siding with the school?

Yahoo’s Ross Dellenger, who, for my money, is more plugged into the Washington D.C. than any other college sports reporter, reported this over the weekend

This tracks with what I’ve been hearing over the last few weeks…that Democratic opposition is eroding and that the Cruz/Moran camp is confident there’s a compromise bill out there that can get 60 Senate votes. I’ve been told drafts of any antitrust protections would be “limited”, and “conditional”, depending on the NCAA’s ability to execute on various medical care reforms and/or scholarship guarantees.

My gut is that public frustration with the Nico story pushes some less-engaged lawmakers and staffers towards finally getting a working bill together. It might fall apart, especially if Trump gets involved and makes it impossible for Democrats to support anything the Senate puts together. But this is a possibility that I think industry professionals cannot afford to dismiss anymore.

There’s a lot of blame to go around here

I won’t pretend I’ve always nailed this perfectly, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how us writers talk about the actual college athletes when we talk about labor and structural issues in college athletics.

On one hand, these athletes are generally around 20 years old. I believe it is critical that we do not accidentally superimpose our middle-aged thinking on how college students should behave or think. Nobody other than Alex P. Keaton is thinking about state income tax rates or asset diversification or antitrust law at 20. They might have well-meaning adults try to talk to them about that, sure, but it ain’t sticking.

I think us writers ought to remember what age-appropriate behavior is like, even for elite athletes. Twenty-year-olds are going to occasionally make dumb decisions, play too many video games, chase girls instead of books, eat stupid things at 2 AM, and occasionally be emotionally volatile.

But I also chafe as the reflective designation of college athletes, and especially elite P4 athletes, as “kids”. They’re not really kids anymore, and especially not in this era. They’re young people, but also young people entrusted with significant responsibility, and are compensated accordingly. Making stupid decisions may be age appropriate behavior, but part of the reason we ideally learn to make less stupid decisions is because we also begin to face consequences for those decisions.

So I would respectfully and gently disagree with some of my colleagues who don’t believe athletes should share any blame in public frustration from a holdout or transfer decision.

Blame the suits first? Absolutely. The current NIL situation exists because Myles Brand and Mark Emmert failed to make even modest concessions or reforms on athlete compensation or classification, instead pushing for can kicking or doubling down on legal battles. Now the NCAA and campus administrators have very little power.

But I believe we should try not to infantilize athletes. They are adults with at least some measure of agency, and as public figures, they are not immune to potential consequences of their decisions. I wouldn’t blame any Tennessee fan for being upset not just as the proverbial “system”, but at their old quarterback as well. Just like many are right here.

I dunno how all of this ends. But I know enough to know that if you don’t enjoy what college football is right now, there are more people to blame than just the academic administrators who aren’t working in college sports anymore.