I swear to God I am a Tennessee fan, I promise I like the Vols and cheer for them
But I mean c’mon y’all…
In what fucking world is this okay behavior by an Athletic Department or any level of sports organization. The level of disrespect and dismissal of Nico and so quickly. It is disgusting, y’all are abysmal to associate with. If the words, “We have Jake Merklinger” left your mouth in the last three days I want to violently assault you. You want to throw away a “mid” QB for $1.6 million more (that is not even guaranteed cash value we do not know the terms of these deals) days before the Spring Game, and turn to the 2024 12th ranked QB.1
Expounding on that, as a recruit Merklinger was considered an “excellent decision maker” and sure, fine. That is really good for Huepel’s offensive style, I cannot argue with that. However, that is intangible nonsense when it comes to evaluating a person’s performance. We don’t KNOW he is a good decision maker because all we have is High School film. Coaches say shit all the time and we are the kings of just saying shit to pacify the fans. I remember being sold Guarantano...
In these times I am reminded of when we fired Butch Jones. How fast the media frenzy was, how many coaches we were “linked to”, and then getting (drumroll please…) Jeremy Pruitt. Literal cornbread levels of excitement. It was this time, when I remember my dear friends and family telling me that he would save the program.
“We have Fulmer as AD now too, it will just be like the good ole days”
It is here, that a young vols fan has a decision. You can take the delusion pills or you can look at what is happening around you. It is these moments, where you can lie to yourself. You can think in the offseason that this is fine. We don’t have a ton of press interactions. Wonder how the locker room feels?
Where’s Squirrel? Florida State? Wasn’t he in the playoffs with us, and Florida State missed a bowl? Weird, why would they be better than us? But he “didn’t produce” so, let him walk...
Wonder how it feels to see your program stiff your star player. The only QB to ever take Tennessee to a Playoff game.
“Mid”
Go fuck yourself.
Have some god damn respect. Be so fucking real about what just happened. In three fucking days, our genius Athletic Department fumbled our starting QB. Did I mention it was the Spring Game? The only time we get to have a piece of media attention in the offseason is about us losing our playoff earning QB. Dysfunction at its fucking finest. Please for the love of God, someone with a straight face explain to me how this makes my football team better. You can’t. Who do you want in the portal?
Let’s get DJ Uiagalelei!
This is the height of Vols fandom y’all. We win one time. One fucking time and that is all it will ever be. We are so unserious about winning it is actually insane. Do you think this happens at Bama? Ohio State?2 Dude even fucking Penn State knows how to pay a bum to guarantee 9 to 10 wins. The larger implication of this weekend makes me sick. We have learned absolutely nothing. We are going to continue to flounder and be outperformed by every SEC program, no matter how much money the boosters throw at the fucking school (but not Nico). We can build a riverfront play palace, we can gentrify and destroy the strip, AND we can win 6 games.
Home losses to South Carolina and Mark Stoops’ Kentucky in 2027, book it. I bet we have fired Huepel by then too...
If you want to be serious about winning, allow me to lecture you on what we should be demanding. One of two things had to be different:
- You don’t think Nico is the QB of the future, be a buyer in the Portal – Have some presence of mind. There is 0 chance that these guys in the Coaching staff and AD offices were not aware of this issue before the close of the tournament. This had to be ongoing discussions. Cool, fine. If you EVER thought, “oh he is not worth that” then it is your fucking job to find someone who you think is worth it. I cannot believe I have to explain this, but AD’s are essentially toddlers with law degrees and coke addictions. We should have been finding someone to be our QB months ago if this was an issue. This does a couple things for you (as a program) but chiefly it gives you flexibility and options for if this happened. Which, reminder, it did happen.
- You got fucked, pay him. Does not fucking matter. – Okay, so, Nico bent you over the barrel. Sucks! Learn from it and move on. Pay him and just preserve the integrity of the current locker room and team. The other option is “sending the message”. So, what is that message? I don’t want to pay you and I am stuck in the times where I wish I did not have to pay you. No, its probably, I don’t think anything you do for my program will ever warrant your actual value. That seems about right. $4 million may seem like a lot now but it will not be in 5 years. This is stupid. This fucking decision was stupid.
Yet here we are DEFENDING this fucking team? No, that is cope and you know it. I want to resubmit the offer for you to explain how this gets better for us? You like Merklinger’s first SEC game being September 13, 2025 at home against Georgia? You think that goes well for him? I think Kirby Smart is laughing at you right now. I think the entire SEC is laughing at us (again). For the sake of entertaining you, lets say God blesses us and Georgia loses to us. 3-0 start, dream scenario. We are then asking an unproven rookie to win games on the road at Kentucky, Bama, and Florida. We are asking him to beat Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Vandy at home. You can say “oh Florida is down, Oklahoma is down, Vandy is Vandy”, till the cows come home but the reality is this: we are the Vols. I hate to be a nihilist but read the room. Florida has owned our asses in the Swamp for the better part of two decades and that game will be the second to last game of the season. Primetime for us to lose and slide out of the playoff picture. Vandy beat Alabama last year and gave us a scare early in our game, they are getting better. Oklahoma may be the game I am most confident in but that should say something.
Think about how we felt last year at this point. I was thinking 10 wins, and rightfully so. Now I am worried about Kentucky? This is a fucking joke right? This is a larger issue too with us. We sent off the most successful QB we have ever had in the playoff era with two birds up calling him “mid”. Get over yourselves. Get mad at the fucking Athletic Department for letting this happen. We are constantly dismissing the red flags of how we operate as a team and for what?3 I mean if we are going to get Federal injunctions to operate a shady ass NIL system4 then can we at least keep a team together that was winning? You are stopping NCAA investigations into how you pay your players but you have a line in what amount is too much? Fuck off. Pay him and let’s win.
This is a major red flag. This is a recessive indicator for our program. This is bad. Stop acting like it is fine. Stop pretending like we will be okay. This is an absolutely insane thing that our team just did. It is okay to be mad and to direct it at someone who fucked up their job. It is okay to hit the panic button. This is us settling for beating either Alabama, Georgia, or Florida once every 5 years but never all at once. That would be too good. God forbid someone make some money for being good at something.
Fuck that guy, I am sure he’ll suck wherever he goes. I am sure I am not part of the problem for being so critical and sensitive to losing despite being ass for so long. I deserve to expect a level of winning that has never been experienced in the 21st century by my team. I get to be insufferable in this expectation and delusionally blind to the fact that my program is going to just handicap our team at any point.
This is the way of the Tennessee fan. Blindness to our enemies because we are so good.
We are going to make the playoffs and everything will be fine. I am sure that we won’t struggle at all without Nico. The path is so easy in the SEC anyways. A Big 10 team won last year the conference is buns now anyways. The Vols are going to take care of business and we will be better than we were last year, right?
I feel like I am going insane. I know people will call this an overreaction. Not a single snap of real football has been played so you can say that, now. However, I would love to ask you, “do we do better than last season?” or even “do you think we make the playoffs?” You know the answer.
Can you land a plane in an emergency?
For the rest of this, I want to switch focuses to a couple criticisms I have of the larger conversation about this. I am just sick of the bullshit though. Stop defending rich ass-hats in sports 2025 folks. Get the trend started! Anyways, skip to the sections you want to read:
- Agents, NIL / Player Contracts, the NCAA
- Commiserating and more feelings
- Nico’s Play and performance
- “Agents got in Nico’s ear” and “This is the problem with NIL”
First, let me acknowledge the truth of these statements. I think the sentiment here is very fair and I think it is completely valid to want to criticize the system at large here. Please, allow me to direct your attention to the NCAA and the environment that has been fostered. Allow me to remind you, that the NCAA knew about the coming time of having to compensate players and did not prepare for it, intentionally.
You hate the current structure of the NIL, I get it but, that is by design. It is meant to stall and skirt around the idea of paying players directly. It is designed to do this solely because if you start directly paying players, they lose non-profit status. They are no longer tax exempt. When we talk about wanting contracts for players or more organized systems for a transfer portal (good healthy things for the league), we cannot have those because the NCAA is clinging on to not acknowledging the obvious. These players are employees. The NCAA is dragging its feet (out of senseless greed) and is creating a living nightmare for everyone to operate in. Let me be perfectly fucking clear, there are a million different ways to attack this and operate a better system for the players and teams. How do I know? They exist all around us! In the United States, in Europe, Dana fucking White operates a fairer system for his athletes than the NCAA. This is not that hard, why can’t it get done? Again, greed. It is that simple and until we demand that they start doing this fairly, shit like this is going to happen.
The transfer portal is a nightmare. NIL is terrible. We all agree. However, again, some of y’all suffer from amnesia about paying players. The cat is beyond out of the bag. I’d argue it was probably never in a bag to begin with, we should know.5 I struggle believing that you all can make the argument that they do not deserve it, it has also been proven it will not hold up in even the most conservative supreme court in recent memory.6
Imagine getting 9-0’d in a court built for corporations to exploit your employees. Your model was so illegal that Justice Kavanaugh said, “Law firms cannot conspire to cabin lawyers’ salaries in the name of providing legal services out of a ‘love of the law.’ Hospitals cannot agree to cap nurses’ income in order to create a ‘purer’ form of helping the sick. News organizations cannot join forces to curtail pay to reporters to preserve a ‘tradition’ of public-minded journalism. Movie studios cannot collude to slash benefits to camera crews to kindle a ‘spirit of amateurism’ in Hollywood. Price-fixing labor is price-fixing labor.” He is calling them a cartel in metaphoric legal terms. Rightfully so. This decision went so poorly for the NCAA, that it was the first time Justice Clarence Thomas had spoken in the Supreme Court since his wife bussed people to the January 6th riot. The NCAA is legally an embarrassment and litigiously undefendable apparently.
In the capitalist hellscape of sports, the NCAA is definitively and absolutely the most soulless. Public enemy #1, if you will. It has been offered opportunities to change, and it doesn’t. It stands in a larger system of American sports to devalue the American athlete. Functionally, it robs athletes of years of payment and thus, years of leverage that they can use. Paying players is happening. Let’s do it right. Let’s get the players a CBA and let’s get the schools signing players to contracts that we all know buyouts and terms for. You want agents to stop tampering? Make real fucking rules.
I am definitely going to be expounding upon this much more another time. However, it applies here. You should realize that this is not a system that anyone can thrive in and that is by design. If you want to be mad or upset about NIL, do not be mad about people receiving fair value. Be mad at how they are compensated with discrepancies among teammates and even just unknown amounts of tracking.7 Be mad that the current system allows agents to run rampant with no oversight or need for qualifications.8 I cannot emphasize the number of layers that exist to how fucked up the current structure is. It by itself needs its own dive. I just want to illustrate the idea that there is a much larger reason for why this was allowed to happen.
If we have contracts, Nico is locked into a deal. He does not leave and he can not just be like “hey I want more money” and start a fall out. If buyouts existed (assuredly Nico’s would be high) that would be the only way for him to leave. The idea that a simple system cannot exist inside of a billion-dollar sports entity is comical and asinine. It is entirely insulting to the intelligence of the fans and it should be talked about and treated as such.
2. Feelings! I am sad! Its okay!
I do want to take a moment to commiserate as well here. Tennessee is by far my favorite place to be for a sports event (duh). The campus is gorgeous, the mountains are too. The people are friendly (when you wear orange, please be less toxic y’all) and will drink with the best of them. The environment for games is consequently raucous and demonstrably energetic. Players love the environment that we build to play in. I have a hard time believing that Nico just wanted to leave. This was a negotiation that went awry and he got tossed to the curb. We should not just dismiss him like that though. He was a “terrific servant to the club” in Football Manager terms. The energy we should give and show on the field should transcend beyond this school for the things he accomplished here. Because again reminder, under Nico we were the best Vols team in 20 years. We beat Alabama for the second time in 3 years. He had us ranked all season and we were in the playoffs for the first time ever.
What is tragic here is how this ended for all of us. Nico does not deserve to be hated because our team fucked him over. That is insane. We should not be worshipping the ground he walks on, but let’s at least hold a moments peace for him. No one is going to think of the “love” of Tennessee fans when they see how we have treated Nico’s exit. It is sad, it is upsetting, and it is frustrating for all of us. Do not take that out on him. Be fair and honest about what he was to us. That being said…
3. Nico’s play on the field
Elephant in the room, we have looked wildly inconsistent under Nico. Call a spade a spade, right? However, let’s crunch some numbers.
Nico in 2024 – 2616 passing yards, 63.8 comp % (213/334), 19 TDs and 5 INTs (13 games played)9
If you look at all of these relative to the other QBs in the SEC, Nico’s position in most of these categories flutters around 7th. His highest ranking is 6th in attempts and completions. This speaks to a couple things.
- We run a very balanced offense. Giving the run game a ton of use with Dylan Sampson and a 1st year QB makes sense.
- First year QB. He missed a lot of throws but was not trusted to take many shots. We saw this in the first year of Hooker and late in the season with Joe Milton. Yet, in Hooker’s second season we saw real progression in confidence and accuracy because he got to continue working with Heupel.
Consider this, in Peyton Manning’s Sophomore season (1995) he threw for 2954 yards, 22 TDs, 4 INTs off of a 64.2 comp % (244/380) in 11 games.10 It is more in less games. It is also somewhat similar production in general. Being pragmatic, Nico would have probably not become Peyton Manning. I do just want to illustrate that he would have gotten better though. When you are comparatively close to a school legend in production, we should have expected a relative comparative increase.
Also, re: the point about if we thought he was regressing, we should have acted in the portal much faster and earlier but again that would make too much fucking sense.
I want to emphasize something else about this. While Nico was not flawless and by no means a world beater in the league, he is excellent in Heupel’s offense. Nico would have gotten better and we would have had a year-to-year consistent starter. Now, we are taking a risk. An unnecessary one. I don’t know that he would or could have led us to a national championship. I am not arguing that he was incredible and deserving of some praise that is undeserving. I am arguing that we are taking a step back and are not showing a good face as a program by doing this. We could have built upon a successful campaign from last season but instead, we are destabilizing.
You can blame the losses of last season on Nico as much as you want. You should also recognize what last season was. The best season of Vols football that we have had since 1998. Nico Iamaleava was the leader and Quarterback of that team. In an offseason where we lose some of our best players to the draft, and some key contributors early in the portal, we are now losing the QB that led us to our best season in 20 years because of frugality. I want to believe it will be okay, that we will remake the playoffs and take the “next step” as a program. I do want to see us win, but this is not winning behavior. I fear it to be another mark on our tapestry of failed ambition.
All-in-all, who knows what will happen this season, I really hope Merklinger is good and I am wrong. I would love to be wrong. I would love to look back at this as a panicked overreaction to a very kneejerk moment in time. I just suffer from knowledge that programs who allow these types of shenanigans, do not usually compete as winners on a year-to-year basis. I don’t think building a winning program looks like losing your QB before the spring game. Even if Merklinger is good, what is going to happen when he asks for more money? Aren’t we just back here again? What does that make us? A frugal stepping stone for talent that consistently showcases players for better teams to take? Or the hate able loser that has visceral fans who insufferably defends a program that laughs at the idea of winning? I cannot fucking believe that we are doing this, and I was hoping to just get to next season relatively unscathed. Apparently, that’s too much to ask.
Links:
2 – https://www.espn.com/college-football/game/_/gameId/401677177/tennessee-ohio-state
3 – https://www.knoxnews.com/story/sports/college/university-of-tennessee/football/2025/01/31/tennessee-settles-federal-lawsuit-with-ncaa-over-nil-rules/78095279007/
7 – https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/interactive/2024/nil-money-deals-college-sports-athlete-pay/
8 – https://brobible.com/sports/article/college-football-nil-agents-fee-transfer-sketchy-jay-norvell/
9 – https://www.sports-reference.com/cfb/players/nico-iamaleava-1.html#all_leaderboard
10 – https://www.sports-reference.com/cfb/players/peyton-manning-1.html
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