One year later: Who Alabama’s Nick Saban was really talking to when he called out Jimbo Fisher and Texas A&M
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Alex Scarborough, ESPN Staff Writer
FROM THE OUTSIDE, what happened a year ago this week looked like a bruised ego lashing out. Alabama coach Nick Saban couldn’t abide not having the top-ranked recruiting class in the country, so he took aim at No. 1 Texas A&M, claiming it “bought every player” via name, image and likeness deals.
Aggies coach Jimbo Fisher was so incensed by his former boss’ comments that he called a news conference for the following day. He said, among other things, that Saban was a “narcissist” who should have been slapped.
Opposing coaches said while Fisher made it unnecessarily personal, it was Saban who started the war of words by crossing a line and singling out Texas A&M.
“Nick lost on the field,” said one SEC head coach, referring to Alabama’s loss to Texas A&M during the regular season. It was the first time Saban had ever been defeated by a former assistant. “But worse than that, he’d lost some recruits he doesn’t normally lose.”
But it also didn’t add up that an 8-4 Texas A&M team with an outdated offense could sign all those four- and five-star prospects, said the SEC coach. “One thing changed,” he said, referring to the NCAA’s decision in June 2021 to allow players to profit from their name, image and likeness for the first time. While perhaps not its intended purpose, NIL has shifted the dynamics of recruiting more than at any point in college sports history.
And it turns out that even a juggernaut like Alabama — which has dominated recruiting since Saban arrived in 2007 — was caught unprepared.
If you want to understand why Saban said what he did last May, start there. Sources close to the program say it was never about Texas A&M or Jimbo Fisher. It was all about Alabama.
It was about the people in the room that night — at an event in Birmingham promoting the World Games of all things. Media access was supposed to be limited for a “fireside chat” featuring Saban and Alabama basketball coach Nate Oats. Neither coach took questions from reporters. Cameras should have been shut off by the time Saban launched into a 7-minute diatribe on NIL.
Only no one enforced the rules and everyone got to hear Saban’s unvarnished talking points, which he’d only shared privately before.
“It was a challenge to those that were in the crowd that night, mostly consisting of deep-pocketed Bama boosters in what was a relatively intimate event,” said former Tide QB Greg McElroy. “It was a shot in the arm like, ‘Hey, man. I know you’ve really enjoyed the championships that we’ve brought home in the last 12-13 years. And if you want us to continue to compete, you better get the checkbook out.'”
For the longest time, those same boosters had poured money into the athletic department. But now that wasn’t enough. To stay at the top, Saban needed them to embrace NIL and start spending.
“That was Coach’s call to action,” McElroy said. “He’s saying, ‘Guess what? The world is changing, and we better get ready.'”
FANS WHO CAME to Tuscaloosa for the spring A-Day scrimmage last month were able to visit The Authentic. Located inside of Bryant-Denny Stadium, the shop is a first-of-its kind partnership with Fanatics where people can purchase player-branded NIL merchandise.
To the left of the main register is an assortment of player-specific items. A crimson short-sleeve shirt with the last name and number for cornerback Kool-Aid McKinstry, safety Malachi Moore, outside linebacker Dallas Turner and others. A few yards away a framed photo of wideout Ja’Corey Brooks sells for $199.
A portion of sales goes to the players.
None of this existed a year ago. The Authentic wasn’t announced until July. It didn’t open until Oct. 8 — which just so happened to be the day Alabama hosted Texas A&M in football.
High Tide Traditions was Alabama’s primary collective when Saban and Fisher got into it last year. It was barely a month old, trying to raise awareness and money. As one source described the situation: “Everyone was scrambling.”
The school’s NIL offerings were lagging behind other top programs in the country because of the athletic department’s cautious approach to future legislation and sustainability, as well as boosters’ contentedness with the status quo.
“The Tennessees, the USCs, the A&Ms, the Texases, the Miamis, they’re desperate fanbases that are willing to throw their money away at [NIL],” a source familiar with Alabama’s NIL fundraising said. “If all of the sudden they won six national championships, I guarantee you those donors would tell them, ‘Find someone else.'”
The result was a recruiting powerhouse that was loosening its grip — ever so slightly, but enough to make a difference.
It’s a reality Saban has acknowledged in private. At a booster gathering last month, he addressed NIL. High Tide Traditions had dissolved in February and was replaced by Yea Alabama, which Saban publicly endorsed. Boosters in attendance were given pamphlets on the new collective, showing how they could get involved. Saban told the crowd they were still playing catch-up. But, he said, they were closing the gap fast.
For proof, look no further than the newcomers who took the field at A-Day, including members of a freshman class that ranked No. 1 nationally, according to ESPN. Saban and his staff signed a record eight top-25 prospects. Four of those eight signees — offensive tackle Kadyn Proctor, defensive back Caleb Downs, running back Justice Haynes and defensive tackle James Smith — participated in a meet-and-greet at The Authentic in February.
Haynes was the star of the open scrimmage with three touchdowns (two rushing, one receiving). This summer, he’ll be joined by the No. 1-ranked running back in the class in Richard Young.
Also featured for the first time were transfers Trezman Marshall from Georgia, who had four tackles, and tight end CJ Dippre from Maryland, who caught one pass.
Without a more aggressive NIL approach, are all of those players in Tuscaloosa? Maybe not. A source connected to the program said Alabama lost out on signing a star receiver in the transfer market a year earlier because it was unwilling (or unable) to get into a bidding war.
In the weeks after A-Day, Alabama added to its quarterback room by signing former Notre Dame starter Tyler Buchner. And it created some much needed depth in its secondary by bringing in Trey Amos from Louisiana and Jaylen Key from UAB.
Saban was asked in December about how NIL played a role in the team’s 2023 signing class, which featured four more ESPN 300 players than the year before.
“It did have an impact on recruiting with some players,” he said.
He paused and then shrugged.
“I don’t know how you make comments about a crazy situation right now,” he said.
1:17
Saban likes what he sees so far from new Alabama OC
Nick Saban says he and his players are very pleased thus far with new Crimson Tide offensive coordinator Tommy Rees after the first spring scrimmage.
FROM THE BEGINNING, Saban has been up front about his reservations regarding NIL. While he has repeatedly said he’s in favor of players making money, he has also expressed concerns about how it might become the end-all, be-all in recruiting, creating a “pay for play” model.
That night in Birmingham, Saban told the audience what recruits were asking him: “Well, what am I going to get?” He said prospects in the state who grew up wanting to go to Alabama wouldn’t commit if the Tide could not match another school’s offer.
While the Tide could coast on reputation for a while — internally, the consensus was they wouldn’t experience a significant dip for another one or two recruiting classes — it was clear the old way of doing things was over. And it wasn’t just Texas A&M setting the pace. Saban also brought up Jackson State and Miami for reportedly paying exorbitant amounts for players. He didn’t mince words when he said, “I know that we’re going to lose recruits because somebody else is going to be willing to pay them more.”
“He had a structure. He had a system. He was nailing college football,” one SEC coach said. “Why would you want something new? Just like he didn’t want the new-age offenses around, he didn’t want NIL.”
Right or wrong, another source said, “The anger and frustration was that there were other people out there not playing by the rules.” Specifically, Saban has brought up the notion that NIL isn’t supposed to be used to “entice” a player to a certain school. But that’s an awfully fine line that no program has been publicly accused of crossing by the NCAA.
Former staff members recalled a similar situation when Saban underestimated the impact of the early signing period when it began for the 2018 class. Saban was frustrated by Alabama’s lackluster sixth-place finish in the recruiting rankings that year, but he adjusted and the next year the Crimson Tide were No. 1 again.
Just like his public opposition to up-tempo offenses a decade ago — he famously asked if this was what we wanted football to be? — it’s a mistake to interpret his comments as coming from a place of fear. After losing to the more advanced offenses of Ole Miss, Auburn and Texas A&M, Saban went out and hired former USC coach Lane Kiffin after the 2013 season to bring the spread and up-tempo to Tuscaloosa. The result was national championships and a string of pro quarterbacks in Jalen Hurts, Tua Tagovailoa, Mac Jones and Bryce Young.
Even if he starts a half-beat behind sometimes, Saban has proved he can catch up and often get ahead of the curve. As a former assistant explained, “He’s not afraid of change.”
Making things easier was the NCAA’s revised guidance on NIL in October, which included this key point: “Institutions may direct donor funds to collectives when fundraising, but they may not specify which student-athlete or sport these funds should be directed to.”
In January, Alabama announced another landmark deal, this time with multimedia rights giant Learfield. The pair planned to create an “epicenter of support for name, image and likeness” right next-door to The Authentic, providing players resources like a dedicated staff, meeting space and even a studio.
The Fanatics and Learfield deals, along with others, put Alabama on solid footing. Athletic director Greg Byrne recently told the Sports Business Journal, “We have tried to be slow and steady from an NIL standpoint. We have tried to not have a whole lot of shock and awe.”
DON’T BE SURPRISED if Alabama still gets outbid on occasion.
Just because the school has more money to commit to NIL now than it did before doesn’t mean it has the most. Its donor base is still relatively modest compared to larger, more well-funded alumni bases like Texas A&M’s.
“Miami, Texas, Oregon,” said one Power 5 head coach. “They have more money than Alabama’s donors do.”
A leader of a Power 5 collective in the South said Saban’s original vision for NIL made sense. Essentially, Saban wanted every player to earn the same amount — a base salary of sorts — and from there they could earn more in the marketplace based on performance and exposure. The problem, according to the leader of the Power 5 collective, is that the base salary was too small for some higher-end recruits and Alabama was getting outbid by two and three times.
Sources say that’s changed and Alabama has become more competitive thanks to better NIL funding. Which in turn has allowed Saban to make up the difference by pitching the national reach of the program — read: lucrative marketing opportunities — and the ability to compete for national championships.
Saban then uses another three-letter acronym to reinforce Alabama’s value: NFL.
His pitch to recruits, according to multiple sources, is simple yet effective: Do you want to make an extra $30,000 in NIL somewhere else or do you want to come here and make an extra $30 million by going to the NFL?
Alabama has produced more than 40 first-round picks since Saban arrived in 2007. Its creative team is fond of trotting out graphics with the total amount of money earned by players in the NFL since that time. The latest tally: $1.94 billion.
Saban says playing for national championships and developing for the next level should trump upfront NIL money. He can look no further than Texas A&M’s highly touted classes of 2021 and 2022, which have seen 15 departures following a 5-7 season with just two wins in SEC play last season, for evidence that winning matters.
But to be in the conversation with top prospects, NIL money has to be competitive. In the beginning, Alabama was too far apart from other schools. Now, according to sources, Alabama is close enough in NIL for the rest of Saban’s pitch to matter.
Complacency will always be a concern. A program insider pointed to Florida’s downfall after Urban Meyer — how the program relied on its reputation for too long, didn’t invest properly in facilities and fell behind.
But the difference is that Saban is still at Alabama. And he still clearly has a sense of urgency when it comes to staying ahead of the competition.
Losing to Texas A&M stung. Losing to the Aggies in recruiting was something he couldn’t stomach.
The result was a messy back-and-forth the SEC brass surely wishes never happened. But from Alabama’s perspective, it might have been the wake-up call boosters needed.
Saban and the Tide might have been a step slow when it came to the NIL arms race, but they’ve caught up in a hurry.
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Chris Low
NASHVILLE — It’s a memory that flashed through Vanderbilt coach Clark Lea’s mind more than once when the program was in the throes of a 26-game SEC losing streak in 2022, his second season as coach.
The memory presented itself again a year ago as Lea guided Vanderbilt to its first winning season since 2013, its first-ever win over a No. 1 team and a bowl victory over Georgia Tech, all culminating with Lea being named SEC Coach of the Year by his peers.
“I remember watching [assistant coach] Robbie Caldwell and my other coaches line the practice field and mow the grass when I played here,” said Lea, a fullback on head coach Bobby Johnson’s first teams at Vanderbilt from 2002-04. “They did everything.”
Contrast that to the scene last October after the Commodores’ signature win of the season, a 40-35 victory over top-ranked Alabama. Following Vanderbilt’s first win over the Crimson Tide in 40 years, fans ripped down the goalposts, paraded them through Nashville and dumped them into the Cumberland River.
The surreality of it all was matched by the resolve of Lea and his players, and their insistence that, in the words of quarterback Diego Pavia, “the rest of the world might have been shocked, but we weren’t.”
“We’re in a business of messaging, and a lot of what I remember as a player is the disconnect from the university and the athletic department and the team, and especially the lack of resources,” Lea said.
It’s a situation Lea inherited when he returned to his alma mater as coach in December 2020 in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, as did his boss, Candice Storey Lee, when she was hired a year earlier as the SEC’s first Black female athletic director.
Together, they’re trying to change the narrative and not operate, as Lee jokes, like the little engine that could.
“It was the idea that we were going to unhook from the past and take steps that build toward the future that we all believe we’re capable of here,” said Lee, who has three degrees from Vanderbilt and was on campus the same time as Lea as a captain on the 2002 women’s basketball team that won the SEC tournament.
“Sometimes perception does not match reality, but the reality is that there was a narrative that Vanderbilt was not going to do the things that were necessary to experience consistent success. So from the very beginning, we had to set out to show that we were serious about wanting to compete and compete at the highest level, and we are still doing that. That process isn’t complete.”
Lea’s breakthrough 2024 season in his fourth year back on West End sent perhaps the clearest signal yet that the process is yielding results — and not just in football.
For the first time, Vanderbilt’s football team, men’s and women’s basketball teams and baseball team have all been nationally ranked during the same academic year.
But no climb has been steeper than the one faced by the football program, which was plummeting toward rock bottom when Lea arrived and only got worse during his second season, when the Commodores’ SEC losing streak reached 26 games. Lea wasn’t around for all those losses, but the walls were nonetheless closing in even when the Commodores salvaged a 5-7 record.
Then came 2023, when Vanderbilt dipped to 2-10 (0-8 in the SEC), and the heat ratcheted up on Lea. The Commodores lost all eight of their SEC games by two touchdowns or more.
“Hey, there were days where I was face down on the floor here, and it’s just, ‘Get yourself up, dust yourself off and trust in your resilience to do the next right thing the right way,'” Lea said. “For me, once I kind of realized that I may get my ass kicked a few times, nothing was going to knock me off from leading this program day in, day out, and making the changes that unlock the potential for success.”
Lea wasn’t the only one catching heat from the fans, media and some boosters. So was his former classmate Lee, who hired him. Making matters worse for Lee was that the men’s basketball team was struggling under Jerry Stackhouse and went 4-14 in SEC play during the 2023-24 season. Lee fired Stackhouse after the season and replaced him with Mark Byington, who took a team picked to finish last in the SEC to the NCAA tournament.
“One of the things that I know from going through knee replacement surgery recently is that healing and building is not a linear process,” Lee said. “Some days, it’s really good, and then something happens and I wake up and my knee is swollen. I don’t really understand what happened, but you still have to push forward and know there is something beautiful on the other side.
“You just wish it was easy, but it’s not.”
VANDERBILT’S CAMPUS, A short walk to the heart of downtown Nashville, one of America’s fastest growing cities, is dotted with signs that read “Dare to Grow.” Construction sites, cranes and hard hats are everywhere. Right outside Lea’s office window in the McGugin Center, the transformation of FirstBank Stadium continues with the South End Zone project, featuring premium seating and other amenities. It’s part of the Vandy United $300 million campaign, announced in 2021, to rebuild the school’s athletics facilities.
“We reached that $300 million goal pretty quickly, and we didn’t stop,” Lee said. “We have aspirations beyond that number, so we’re going to keep dreaming. We’re going to keep raising the money, we’re going to keep investing.”
The reality is that Vanderbilt can’t stop if it’s going to have any chance to compete with the football juggernauts in the SEC, especially in the current NIL world. But Lee is insistent that Vanderbilt is “beautifully positioned to maximize whatever model is in front of us” when the House settlement is approved and revenue sharing is in place. The current proposal allows for athletic departments to directly pay athletes with a pool up to $20.5 million in Year 1.
On the facilities front, even with the long overdue facelift to the stadium, the McGugin Center is noticeably outdated with a weight room, team meeting room and offices that pale in comparison to those at other SEC schools. Lea is hopeful a new football operations building comes sooner rather than later but said he doesn’t need a complex loaded with bells and whistles.
Lea looks at the new Huber Center, Vanderbilt’s four-story, state-of-the-art basketball practice facility, and sees what’s possible.
“It’s less important to me and for this program to have things like DJ booths and whatever else,” Lea said. “But I want people to walk into our building and recognize that football is really important here.
“What we’ve done really well here is that our people are the best, and if we can combine that with competitive spaces that also optimize our efficiency, we’re on our way to being where we need to be.”
Some of the people Lea, 43, is talking about are hires that were made primarily during last offseason, when he overhauled just about everything that touched his program. In the last year-plus, he has brought in veteran football people such as senior offensive adviser Jerry Kill, senior defensive analyst Bob Shoop, offensive coordinator Tim Beck and head strength coach Robert Stiner, among others. Kill and Beck are both former head coaches. Stiner and Lea worked together for three seasons at Notre Dame, and Shoop is a former Broyles Award finalist with more than 35 years of coaching experience. He was defensive coordinator under James Franklin for Vanderbilt teams that won nine games in 2012 and 2013.
Offensive line coach Chris Klenakis, entering his second season at Vanderbilt, has seen 24 of his former linemen reach the NFL over a 30-plus year career. He’s also been an offensive coordinator and worked with Colin Kaepernick at Nevada and Lamar Jackson at Louisville.
Lea hasn’t been hesitant to evolve, either. He took over the duties as defensive playcaller last season after the Commodores finished 129th nationally in scoring defense (36.2 points per game) and 131st in total defense (454.9 yards per game) in 2023. Lea said former NFL safety and assistant coach Steve Gregory, in his second season at Vanderbilt, will call defensive plays in 2025.
“I think it’s the best coaching staff in the country,” Pavia said. “Guys are going to want to come here because they see what these coaches get out of players. They see how they develop you. I know what Coach Kill did for me in bringing me here and what that opened up for me.”
PAVIA, WHO EMERGED as one of the most electric players in the country last season after transferring from New Mexico State, played as big a role as anyone in Vanderbilt’s revival. He was the only quarterback in the SEC to pass for more than 2,200 yards and rush for more than 800, accounting for 28 touchdowns, and inside the locker room, he was the heartbeat of a team that reveled in doing what people said couldn’t be done at “little old Vandy.”
Last year’s 7-6 season easily could have been a nine-win campaign. Four of the Commodores’ six losses were by a touchdown or less, including a 30-27 double overtime defeat at Missouri and a 27-24 home loss to Texas in which the Longhorns had to recover an onside kick to seal the game.
And the best part for the Commodores? They return many of the key players from last season, which saw Vanderbilt reach five wins before the end of October, only to lose three of its last four games in the regular season when Pavia wasn’t completely healthy.
“We had one guy transfer out that played for us last year,” said senior linebacker Langston Patterson, who was Lea’s first verbal commitment and went to high school in Nashville at Christ Christian Academy. “It’s about culture. The reason some of those past Vandy teams didn’t sustain success is because they had some great players, but no culture. We have great players on top of great culture, and that creates a great team. But you still have to go do it. Coach Lea touches on it all the time. We’re as close to 2-10 as we are 10-2. We’ve got to keep pushing forward.
“Really, to us, last year was mediocre. We fell apart the last three games. Everyone else thinks we had a great year, but to us, we could have been so much better.”
Lea’s idea of culture transcends the football field. He said the program has had six straight semesters with a collective 3.0 GPA or better in the classroom.
“That’s not because we’re recruiting valedictorians,” Lea said. “It’s because we’re recruiting guys that care about how they’re developing as people too, and they allow us to put boundaries in place for them to reach their highest level.”
As Vanderbilt tries to build on its momentum from a year ago, one thing is certain. The Commodores won’t sneak up on anybody, not after wins over Alabama and Auburn and narrow misses against LSU, Missouri and Texas.
“Nothing changes with us,” Pavia said. “We came here to win games. Coach Lea said it, that we want to have the best program in the SEC. For a lot of guys on this team, it’s our last chance, sort of our last dance, to really flip this program.”
Vanderbilt’s success a year ago came largely thanks to a ball-control offense, shortening the game, winning the turnover battle, stopping the run (especially on early downs) and playing lights-out on special teams.
Even with the recent upgrade in player personnel, it’s always going to be difficult for Vanderbilt to “out-Alabama” Alabama and “out-Georgia” Georgia in terms of sheer talent and depth.
“I know Coach Lea doesn’t believe that we can be like every other SEC team philosophically and find ways to break through to the top,” said offensive coordinator Beck, who also has been a defensive coordinator and spent the first 32 years of his coaching career at Division II powerhouse Pittsburg State. “You have to be a little bit different, and we were a little bit unique. I’m not one of these young offensive coordinators that’s just trying to score as many points as we can every game.
“You try to find ways to reduce the margins a little bit, so you’ve got to play complementary football. We still want to be fun and exciting, which I feel like we are, but we’re not going to be in a huge hurry. We led the nation in forced turnovers last year, which was huge for us because the matchups that we had player to player are still not there yet. We’ve got to be smart about what we do on both sides of the ball.”
Vanderbilt beat Auburn 17-7 last season despite finishing with just 227 total yards. But the Commodores pinned the Tigers inside their own 5-yard line twice, started two of their drives in Auburn territory, committed just three penalties and didn’t turn the ball over once.
“They manage the game as well as anybody,” Auburn coach Hugh Freeze said. “They’re smart. They play to their strengths, and they don’t give you anything.”
As stunning as Vanderbilt’s win over Alabama was to the college football world, Tide coach Kalen DeBoer wasn’t surprised by what he saw this season from Lea and the way he reinvigorated the program.
“I’ve known Clark going back to when he was at South Dakota State, and it wasn’t like we were close friends or anything, but I followed the success he’s had as a coordinator and knew that he was really good,” said DeBoer, who started his coaching career at Sioux Falls. “I felt like watching the film before our game that you could see the defense and the team philosophy revolving around making the game as short as possible, and he did a good job in the critical moments of making some calls.
“I knew going in that they were a different team than what they had been in the past. There was no doubt, and I think everyone who played them would tell you the same thing.”
Now comes the hard part for Lea and Vanderbilt: Doing it all over again.
The only time in the past 50 years that Vanderbilt has put together back-to-back winning seasons was in 2012 and 2013 under Franklin.
Lea, who grew up in Nashville, knows the doubters persist and that history suggests sustaining football success at Vanderbilt is more fantasy than reality. Down deep, he’s energized by that doubt.
“I think we as a program, me in particular, can’t help but operate with a chip on your shoulder, and you can’t help but bathe in the doubt that surrounds you,” Lea said. “We love that, and we don’t recruit beyond that, meaning I don’t want people here that are entitled. I don’t want people here that don’t see the work that has to be done.”
Pavia’s take is a bit more on the coarse side, in typical Pavia fashion.
“I mean, [Lea] comes from ground zero,” Pavia said. “A lot of people weren’t believing in him, people wanting him fired a year ago, and now all of a sudden, he’s the biggest star in Nashville. I think that still fuels him, that people gave up on him, didn’t believe in him on his journey or believe in us.
“So it’s like, ‘F— you. Watch us do it.'”
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Chris Low
The wait for where former Tennessee quarterback Nico Iamaleava plays next in his college career continued Wednesday as the spring transfer portal opened.
UCLA is among the schools interested in Iamaleava, but not for nearly the money he was asking for from Tennessee, sources told ESPN. One source said UCLA was content to “sit tight” while Iamaleava considered his options.
“We’ll see if it gets worked out. He’s extremely talented with starting experience against elite competition. That’s sort of where we are right now,” the UCLA source told ESPN.
Sources told ESPN that Iamaleava wanted at least $4 million from Tennessee and that what UCLA was prepared to offer him wasn’t remotely close to that figure. Iamaleava was earning $2.4 million at Tennessee under the contract he signed with Spyre Sports Group, the Tennessee-based collective, when he was still in high school. It’s a deal that would have paid him in the $10 million range had he stayed four years at Tennessee.
Tennessee coach Josh Heupel announced Saturday after the Volunteers’ spring game that the program was moving forward without Iamaleava after he missed practice and meetings Friday and didn’t alert anybody on the team or return any calls or text messages afterward.
Heupel thanked Iamaleava and called the situation unfortunate, but added, “There’s no one bigger than the Power T, and that includes me.”
Iamaleava, a rising redshirt sophomore, officially entered the transfer portal Wednesday with a do not contact tag.
Sources told ESPN that Iamaleava’s representatives asked to redo his deal just before the close of the winter portal in December after Tennessee’s playoff loss to Ohio State, but his deal was unchanged and Iamaleava did not enter the winter portal. His father, Nic Iamaleava, also wanted Tennessee to surround his son with better receivers and a more effective offensive line in pass protection.
Before the start of spring practice this year, Iamaleava’s representatives reached out to Oregon to gauge its interest in the quarterback, but the school said it wasn’t interested, sources told ESPN. Oregon then notified Tennessee that Iamaleava was being shopped to the Ducks.
Iamaleava, a five-star prospect from Long Beach, California, was recruited by UCLA out of high school. His younger brother, Madden Iamaleava, committed to UCLA out of high school but changed his commitment at the last minute and signed with Arkansas.
With Iamaleava a possibility at UCLA, sources told ESPN that representatives for the Bruins’ current quarterback, Joey Aguilar, have been covering their bases and making calls to other schools to gauge their interest in Aguilar, who transferred from Appalachian State this offseason and exited spring practice as UCLA’s likely starter.
A Power 4 general manager told ESPN’s Pete Thamel and Max Olson earlier this week that he thought Iamaleava has “zero market,” and added that it would be an “interesting test of how smart and disciplined colleges are in looking at him.”
Iamaleava helped guide Tennessee to the College Football Playoff last season in his first year as a starter. He passed for 2,616 yards, 19 touchdowns and 5 interceptions, but in nine games against SEC opponents and Ohio State in the playoff, he passed for more than 200 yards only twice.
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