Silly NILly
What’s next? Threatening to sit out a regular season game?
Note: Based on eligibility guidelines, I assume his SEC days are over.
I blame the system more than the player. I think most of us would also be interviewing with other employers if the market rate for our salary doubled suddenly. The difference between 2m and 4m+ a year is significant.
It’s a business now and the system is totally broken.
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Someone trying to attempt a major league-style holdout was inevitable with how things have been trending. Difference is that there’s no NFLPA or cap penalty to keep things in order, what a friggin mess.
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The BIG and SEC will pirate 15-20 more teams, all the good bowl games as well as major TV deals.
The “rest” Will be “ pickin shit with chickens.”
Who will Miami bball players be when and if the $200 mil. Arena is built.?
My only problem is he signed a four year deal. Maybe I am an old fart but you signed for four at a price that is what you get-should have signed a one year deal and renegotiate every year
Multi year NIL deals are generally binding on the school side, not player. So it’s the minimum the collective will pay him if he stays, but he was always free to look around each year.
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This was bound to happen at some point. Completely out of hand and maybe this swings the pendulum back the other way a little.
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This quote from an on3 article on the situation pretty much sums up my feelings on this. Tenn only landed him because they offered the biggest haul. Why should they be surprised they lost him to a new school offering him more now? If you are going to recruit based on pure salary, don’t be surprised when your employees choose to move on based purely on salary.
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I’ve always said that about recruiting when being part of that in my business career. I wouldn’t want to be the company offering the highest salary (but you don’t want to be on the lower end either), because you’ll attract some recruits only because of that, and they’ll leave as soon as they get a higher offer.
Copy/pasting a longer excerpt from a piece Spencer Hall wrote on this.
Let’s be totally clear: Nico Iamaleava plays football, a sport where everyone should attempt to command the highest price possible at every step, because the end of a career is always one bad hit or blown ligament around the corner. Iamaleava did well at Tennessee on and off the field, but it’s totally understandable in the current market why he’d feel good about hitting the transfer portal. Even if he misses the four-million mark in signing with UCLA or USC, he could still make an average American’s lifetime salary in the next year or two in college before ever considering an NFL paycheck.
That’s how it’s supposed to work in a free market, a dream that entire generations of talented college players never get to experience in their amateur careers. That can be true, and it can also be true that the could-have-beens of Nico Iamaleava at Tennessee are so, so tantalizing in the mind. Another year of experience, and maybe more of those deep balls hit. Maybe his touch on mid-to-short range passes softens, and the game slows down for him in all the best possible ways.
Maybe a Nico Iamaleava who stays at Tennessee wins a conference title with the Vols for the first time this century, and grows the agonizing hints of brilliance on display in his first year into a full-blown monster of an offense, the kind you know Josh Heupel wants at Tennessee. He’s still 6’6” and can throw a ball through drywall, but maybe Iamaleava jumping from one coaching staff to another just as he’s starting to see the whole picture isn’t the greatest career move for his own development — even if it does make sense according to the money.
We don’t have to separate all these things from each other, and it’s possible we can’t. Both the Tennessee football team and Nico Iamaleava did the things they should have done here. But one of the little sadnesses here is this: That shoulda and coulda sometimes have absolutely nothing to do with each other whatsoever.
Until collusion is discovered among opposing coaches.