It’s been just under a month since former five-star quarterback Nico Iamaleava dramatically departed from Tennessee as college football’s first high-profile holdout. A week later, he signed with UCLA on what may have been a smaller contract than he garnered at Tennessee. Since that concluded, college football’s second transfer portal window closed, screwing the lid back onto the jar of chaos for some time.
But where does everything stand?
When whistles start squealing again in fall camp, Iamaleava will be just one of thousands who have departed their previous team. Over 2,700 players entered the spring transfer portal window, according to ESPN, and while most have yet to find homes, the players on teams now might be more notable than their portal counterparts.
“I've heard of players going up to coaches during practice and asking for more money,” said Seth Emerson, a senior college football writer for The Athletic. “Every situation is different.”
That statement would’ve been stroke-inducing for a college football coach 10 years ago. But that’s the new world of college athletics, and while Iamaleava is the most notable case to date, contract negotiations are happening everywhere.
So how did we get here? In 2021, the NCAA enacted a rule allowing college athletes to profit off of their Name, Image and Likeness (NIL), and while that’s old news, that system quickly dissolved into schools -- or, more accurately, third-party collectives that are not officially associated with the universities’ athletic departments -- essentially negotiating pay-for-play contracts, and that happens early.
“You have the Instagram graphics with a [high school] athlete considering Florida, Georgia, Michigan and Ohio State,” said Molly Harry, an assistant professor in the University of Florida Department of Sports Management. “Well, they’re going to all these parties and saying, ‘Hey, this is what we want.’”
Harry specializes in NIL rights and athlete employment status, researching the evolving college athletics world.
“These holdouts happen before the athletes even get on campus,” she added. “It opens a can of worms.”
That’s a product of the negotiation format, which is often fluid and differs depending on the athlete and situation. Notably, the characters range, with interactions occurring between any mix of the player, his family or an agent, and a coach or NIL collective director. There are no rules and no set format for how these conversations occur.
In Iamaleava’s case, his family, which has been outspoken about his value, reportedly played a significant role in his departure from Knoxville. As ESPN and The Athletic reported, the redshirt sophomore starting quarterback sought a pay raise from Tennessee, which he attempted to leverage after the Vols’ playoff berth in December. His negotiation power was also, to some extent, the product of the NCAA’s calendar.
“The spring portal existing gives players additional leverage, though not complete because of the SEC rule saying you have to transfer after the winter window in order to go from one [SEC] school to another,” Emerson said. “You could see more conferences do that. But it doesn't stop players from going to schools in other conferences, so the leverage still exists.”
Iamaleava threatened to leave and started skipping spring practices. Two days later, Tennessee announced it was cutting ties with him, after the two sides couldn't reach a deal. From there, he departed with the ensuing media storm arising. But that situation was coming for a long time. According to Harry, these conversations happen “all the time” without anyone ever knowing. That, accompanied by the spring transfer portal window (which college coaches already had a distaste for), allows athletes to more easily put schools in a corner.
The contracts themselves only exacerbate that. While players are reaching deals with NIL collectives to remain at schools, the framework of these agreements remains murky, to say the least.
“Those deals aren’t necessarily binding, as we’re finding out,” Harry said. “I do think we'll start to see a shift in that language that's being used in these negotiations, in the contracts.”
While not frequent, without the appropriate fine print, players sign contracts with the school’s collective only to then hop away to their next opportunity. Nico Iamaleava’s younger brother, freshman quarterback Madden Iamaleava, is the most aggressive example.
After Nico Iamaleava transferred to UCLA, his brother, an Arkansas commit, decided he would join the family in Los Angeles. The issue? He had signed a deal with Arkansas’ NIL collective.
Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek has now directed the collective to pursue $200,000 in buyout money from Madden (half of the value of his remaining payments). That’s a first-of-its-type case, but Emerson thinks this is the direction athletic programs may turn to create a system of checks and balances, although new NCAA legislation could accomplish the same goal.
“In future cases, when the team really wanted to keep a player to his contract, we could see [breach of contract],” he said, warning that it's possible but won’t be frequent. “There has to be a good reason for the team and school to want to fight it in court and deal with all the hassle and lawyers' fees that would entail.”
Arkansas thought there was, and the result of its case will send waves through the college athletic framework. However, the Iamaleava issue continues to boil back down to the nature of college athlete compensation.
According to Harry, the NCAA doesn’t want to call athletes university employees because of the benefits athletes would then need to be provided, even though it would make contracts more enforceable. Either way, it's “treating them as such,” in both her and Emerson’s eyes, that’s probably going to adjust in the future.
Robert Boland, a Seton Hall assistant professor of law who focuses on sports law and NIL, explained how changes might be coming sooner than the pair expects.
“The one thing that's going to change, assuming the House settlement is ultimately approved this summer, is that, at some point, this issue is kind of going to become moot,” Boland said.
He detailed that the impending $2.8 billion federal class-action House antitrust lawsuit filed against the NCAA may remove some of the stakes from situations like this. Grant House, an Arizona State swimmer, and other collegiate athletes were grouped in a lawsuit seeking NIL damages and injunction to force the NCAA and conferences to share broadcast rights revenue. When the case is settled, and that may be possible this year, schools will be allowed to directly distribute $20.5 million among their athletes, although the implementation timeline for those changes isn’t agreed upon.
In the meantime, a variety of other solutions for Nico Iamaleava's and Madden’s situations float around. Rumblings of the NCAA seeking a bill that will allow it to make its own eligibility rules and “be protected from court challenges” persist, according to Emerson. Even that could be subject to a court challenge on equal protection grounds, though.
Another alternative is the creation of a collective bargaining agreement, which would provide validity to Harry’s assertion that student-athletes are employees.
“I don't know if employee status is the best route to go,” she said. “But I do think it's an avenue worth exploring … I think it solves a lot of the issues people have with athletes transferring, athletes just coming for money.”
The NCAA and schools, however, seem far from granting that, and it would even be difficult for the players. “It's hard to go from zero organization to some entity that would be a union,” Emerson said.
So, for now, it seems like the college athletics landscape will remain in flux. But that doesn’t mean that every school is dealing with a situation like the Iamaleava’s.
Florida ended the 2024 season with four consecutive wins, rolling confidently into the new year with freshman quarterback DJ Lagway. While Gainesville isn’t immune to NIL challenges, housing one of the larger collectives in the nation, it hasn’t seen nearly the same number of departures as most other schools.
Of the 134 FBS football programs, over 105 have had at least four transfers in the spring transfer portal window. Florida has had two: safety Gregory Smith and defensive tackle D’Antre Robinson.
“We've reached agreements with 98% of the team, so I think we're just one or two players away from being done," Florida head coach Billy Napier said after the team's spring game last month, although the Gators did not secure commitments with those final two players, D’Antre Robinson and Gregory Smith III.
The reasons for Florida's success in retaining players are hard to track, but the 2025 season will be the next case study. How does that translate to the field?
In the evolving world of college athletics, it could prove invaluable. While the Iamaleava family may have rattled the NCAA cage, presenting glaring flaws in the system through which student-athletes are compensated, change remains unpredictable and uneven.
“There have been so many so-called inflection points the past few years, so many moments that could have proved galvanizing,” Emerson said. “But so far none have led to … momentum towards something happening.”