Tennessee head football coach Josh Heupel is between a rock and a hard place at the quarterback position on Rocky Top following Nico Iamleava’s highly publicized departure from the Volunteers.
His prized investment, the franchise player he built his program around, is now gone. And he didn’t do enough recruiting at the position, for obvious reasons, to have the depth to survive.
Saturday Down South’s Ethan Stone made a strong implication about Heupel’s future prospects at UT if he sticks with a redshirt freshman with the Vols’ loaded SEC schedule: he cannot afford to get this wrong.
“Nico Iamaleava is out the door, despite the Vols coaching staff advancing through spring practice with the working assumption that he would be Tennessee’s starter at the most important position in the sport. In past years, without the transfer portal being what it is today, Tennessee would probably throw its hands up and turn to redshirt freshman Jake Merklinger. But Year 5 Heupel can hardly afford to do that in today’s NIL landscape. You’d better believe fans will be calling for his job if Heupel sits on his hands as Tennessee finishes 7-5 or worse,” Stone wrote.
“Is all that fair? Maybe not. But it’s the brutal world college football players, coaches, administrators and fans live in.”
TCU’s Josh Hoover, Kansas State’s Avery Johnson, and Iowa State’s Rocco Becht were all floated as potential Iamaleava replacements. Johnson, in particular, has been repeatedly linked to the Volunteers.
K-State Online’s Derek Young downplayed the chances of Johnson jumping ship.
If the previously mentioned QBs are not for sale, Heupel will seemingly find someone from the portal to replace Iamaleava.
And that will determine if Tennessee is a defiant narrative-breaker or a victim of the NIL era’s portal chaos.