Messy NIL Situation Involving the Iamaleava Brothers

We have run a few stories about university sports collectives making promises to student athletes and then not delivering. One involved the Tulsa University football team. The other involved UNLV. Today’s story is sort of the opposite — a pair of brothers transferring and leaving their NIL sponsors with possible breach of contract claims.

For those of you new to this new business, a collective is an alumni group. Universities do not pay their athletes directly; rather, the athletes enter into agreements with the collectives. Under current rules, each university has a budget of about $20 million to spend on Name, Image, and Likeness Agreements (NILs) and other forms of revenue sharing. As we have already seen, things can get messy, as representatives from the university might make promises to athletes about NILs to which the collectives have not agreed or vice versa. 

As indicated on this chart, male athletes who play basketball and football are the beneficiaries of about  94% of NILs and other forms of revenue sharing. Because football teams are seven times the size of basketball teams, the average pay per male basketball player is higher than that for the average football player, but a football quarterback can account for up to 20% of the total NIL budget. Women’s basketball players, the largest group of female athletes who get paid anything at all, account for just 1.2% of that all revenue sharing. 

University of Tennessee quarterback Nico Iamaleava had a $2.4 million NIL with the Tennessee NIL Collective, the Spyre Sports Group. Nico is a very impressive athlete, and he had a great season with Tennessee in 2024. However, as Chris Low, Max Olson, and Adam Rittenberg report on ESPN, Nico was unhappy at Tennessee, and so he entered the transfer portal and moved to UCLA.

There does seem to have been a lot of talk in the Spring about Nico’s “camp” exploring alternatives and looking for a deal in excess of $4 million, but the move doesn’t seem to have only been about money. UCLA reportedly is paying Nico less than he was due from Tennessee. Perhaps he was worried that Tennessee didn’t have adequate offerings in his planned biochemistry major. No, that wasn’t it.

The family expressed concern about Tennessee’s offensive line being unable to protect Nico and refreshing the wide receiving corps. Nico’s options were limited because he could not transfer to another SEC team and still play this season. He will already become a 21-year-old sophomore during his first season with UCLA.  To add some symmetry to the mix, Tennessee then grabbed Joey Aguilar, who was slated to be UCLA’s starting quarterback.

ESPN reports that Nico felt a lot of pressure, and there was a feeling that he was being painted as the bad guy. I’m not sure what that is about. The school invested a lot in the kid. He had enjoyed a lot of success last season, but it’s a team sport. It’s not surprising that there would be hard feelings if a key player leaves in April, and if you don’t want to be portrayed as the bad guy, what’s so hard about staying one more year with a team that is paying you $2.4 million at age 20? But the UCLA coaching staff also behaved in a mercenary way, negotiating to bring Nico to the team while keeping Joey Aguilar in the dark. By the time Nico came to UCLA, it was probably pretty late in the day, and Aguilar probably didn’t have many top-tier options, so Tennessee was the natural fit.

Things got more complicated still when Nico’s younger brother, Madden, who had a one-year contract to play in Arkansas, jumped ship to join his brother at UCLA. There is talk of the Arkansas collective coming after Madden for breach of contract. The breach seems pretty clear. I don’t know if Madden has done any advertising spots to justify his pay, but certainly leaving two months into a contract ought to trigger certain rights. Given the existence of the transfer portal, it would be extremely shortsighted if the collective’s standard agreement did not include some sort of liquidated damages provision. I would expect that Tennessee too will be hoping to claw back anything Nico was paid for the upcoming season.

Part of me rejoices. The center cannot hold. Perhaps we are getting close to admitting that college athletics, at least in football and basketball, has very little to do with college. The vast majority of college athletes have no shot at a professional career. They are capitalizing on their athletic abilities to get access to education. The current system turns them into professional athletes at age 18, and they may be forced to treat their education as a hobby.

Top programs will now all spend $20 million/year, apparently soon to go up to $30 million/year on NIL contracts. But soon those caps will be blown, and it will just be a question of which schools choose to buy the best teams. The competition will become so lopsided, and the connection between the athletes the student body so attenuated, perhaps a time will come that we will realize our mistake and create development leagues. It is true that the money to pay NILs comes from collectives rather than from university budgets, but it simply cannot be the case the university’s ability to raise money would be unaffected by alumni support being directed towards collectives. Sooner or later, boosters run out of resources, especially if the team does not win championships despite years of heavy investment.

If we were to move to the Development League model, following every other country on the planet, young athletes can still get a college education while playing, but they will be actual, professional athletes, earning a living wage or better. And when they are not professional athletes during the off-season, they will be students, subject to the same expectations as other students, enriching both education and athletics without enriching the people who for decades have been exploiting college athletes and taxpayer dollars. A man can dream.

Meanwhile, wouldn’t it be much easier to build a winning basketball team than a winning football team. $4 million for the best point guard; $4 million for the best Center or Power Forward and then $1 million to each of an outstanding supporting cast. That’s how you build championships! Quarterbacks aren’t worth much without a line to protect them and receivers to throw to. As a result, I suspect, it is much harder to detect who the best quarterbacks are, right? Tom Brady was the 199th  draft pick. Brock Purdy was the last. The Bears haven’t had much luck at that position since Sid Luckman.

A final thought on this chapter. Has anybody remarked on the fact that Nico and Madden’s last name announced in advance that they were not going to stay? I guess it’s not pronounced that way, but it looks like they were always saying, “I am a leaver.”