UCLA football: Bruins roll major gamble with Nico Iamaleava acquisition

Close your eyes and imagine it, checkered-board end zones and all.

It’s September in Knoxville, and UCLA is making the almost cross-country trip to an overflowing Neyland Stadium with raw emotion and, yeah, some kind of venom. It’s the most unique non-conference collision the college football world has ever seen, and it’s one of the most anticipated early-season games the sport has ever offered.

It even trumps the titanic Texas-Ohio State opener in Columbus because, for better or worse, we now live in the seedy world of transfer portals and NIL treasure troves. 

Then open your eyes and imagine Nico Iamaleava, the SoCal kid who has taken his ball and gone home to UCLA, striding out of that tunnel at Tennessee and being forced to look Rocky Top right square in the eye. It would be the most unbelievable theatre you could ever dream of.

And, unfortunately, a dream is all it will ever be, much as any ravenous Volunteers fan would wish it to be reality right about now.

Because Iamaleava, who bolted from Knoxville earlier this month with enough controversy and confusion to fill 100 Paul Finebaum shows, isn’t rolling into Neyland Stadium to play in 2025. The only way we could get UCLA-Tennessee this season is if somehow, some way, the programs are matched up in a bowl game by a complete fluke, or if somehow, some way, they meet in the College Football Playoff, which Iamaleava himself made far less likely with his stunning spring transfer to Pasadena.

Tennessee was building toward something special under Josh Heupel the past 3 seasons, going a combined 30-9 with a Playoff bid to hang its hat on in 2024 that the dazzling, dual-threat Iamaleava himself helped author. And in an absurd twist of irony that only present-day college football could concoct, quarterback Joey Aguilar transferred from UCLA to Tennessee in a de facto signal-caller trade — without ever playing a down for the Bruins.

Just further proof we’re hardly living in a college football dream world. More like bizarro world.

Yes, there will be many eyes on Aguilar — who, to nobody’s shock, suddenly decided UCLA wasn’t for him after just 4 months once he knew Iamaleava was headed west. But make no mistake, the quarterback battle Iamaleava left behind in Knoxville will be background noise as we head through the spring and summer months.

The headline act who just made the loudest noise we’ve seen in recent college football history is heading to Los Angeles, down the road from where he grew up in Long Beach. Iamaleava is the headline act, headaches and all.

Headaches, of which there were plenty through this new-age NIL fiasco, like none we’d seen before, because it involved a probable Heisman Trophy candidate picking up and leaving Tennessee high and dry as it readied for its spring game.

Did Iamaleava set himself back football-wise in his quest for more NIL millions? Should he have just kept his head down and kept his deal in Knoxville because, well, Tennessee was steadily climbing toward potential Playoff glory?

Was going home to Southern California and bolting to the Big Ten all at once really worth the stench that surrounded his departure? And was his dad really responsible for a lot of that stench because, somehow, $2.5 million in NIL money in 2025 to potentially lead the Vols on another Playoff run simply wasn’t enough?

We could go on with more mystery and controversy, but that’s already enough to make your head spin. See what we meant about those headaches? Pass the extra-strength Tylenol, please.

Pass the sunblock, too, because the embattled Iamaleava is heading home to the land of sunshine and dreams, even if the cold reality is that he left a Playoff-caliber program behind for a middling one that went 5-7 in 2024 and hasn’t been truly relevant in a long time. He also ended up with a worse NIL deal at UCLA than the one at Tennessee he (and maybe his dad) wanted out of so badly.

Eventually, the dark NIL underworld that has engulfed college football was going to drown one of its potential star players in a mess like this. Now it’s happened to Iamaleava, who will always be remembered for being the incredible talent who led a previous SEC power back to prominence as a redshirt freshman and then walked away from it all.

Unless?

Well, unless Iamaleava actually turns this offseason circus into an unlikely success story come fall. You know, the kind of unlikely success stories that we watch on the big screen courtesy of Hollywood, where Iamaleava just happens to be now.

You can trust there will be a whole lot of fans around the country rooting against any kind of Hollywood ending for Iamaleava, because of how he left Tennessee, because of the millions revolving around a college athlete, because Iamaleava came off as greedy and impatient and incapable of recognizing a potentially great situation at Tennessee.

But what if UCLA, in its infantile stages in the Big Ten, turns out to be a great situation in 2025 and beyond because Iamaleava took this complicated leap of faith to go there? Yes, the Bruins sleepwalked their way to that 5-win season last fall in DeShaun Foster’s first year leading a program that he’s lived and breathed as a former star running back and longtime assistant.

Foster is a member of the UCLA Athletics Hall of Fame. He is Bruin royalty. And now that he’s finally getting the opportunity to run the program, the stakes are that much greater to ultimately succeed. Year 1 wasn’t a success, at least by wins and losses. But Year 1 didn’t come with a star quarterback at the helm like the guy who’ll be taking the snaps this fall in Pasadena.

Iamaleava might not have arrived in the cleanest and clearest way, but it doesn’t matter for UCLA and Foster. The fact is, he’s here, and there was no way Foster was going to say no to a talent like Iamaleava. Foster has too much riding on getting UCLA off the ground the way he couldn’t last year and the way Chip Kelly couldn’t in going 35-34 in the 6 seasons before that.

When Foster was asked by reporters after a recent spring practice about UCLA’s noisy acquisition from Knoxville, he said simply and honestly that it was “just something that we couldn’t pass up.” Foster might not be a winning college football head coach — yet — but he’s a smart guy, and he realizes the baggage that a guy like Iamaleava is bringing to Westwood.

Yes, Iamaleava might be coming home, but he’s got a lot of luggage and a lot of dirty laundry in those luggage bags. That’s just something that Foster is going to have to put up with in the months ahead as the questions continue into summer and eventually fall camp from the Los Angeles and national media. It’s all going to be a part of the Iamaleava package deal, and if this golden opportunity to put UCLA back on the college football map also includes that stuff, well, so be it.

Foster is dying to get UCLA to matter again on the national landscape, the way it hasn’t in way too long. After that spring practice, he took a gander at the number of media who were asking him questions and determined that it was a few more than would’ve been present had a certain sophomore-to-be QB not ruffled a few feathers and decided to become a UCLA Bruin.

“When was the last time we had this many people here talking to us, you know what I’m saying?” observed Foster in speaking to the sea of reporters present after a mundane spring practice on a Tuesday. “So, this is a good buzz for us.”

See that? On an otherwise sleepy Tuesday during spring practice, there was real buzz, and Iamaleava was still a few months away from even arriving at UCLA. Just fast-forward to summertime when that happens and then to the Bruins’ first fall camp workout and imagine the zoo that will have descended to ask questions about UCLA football. 

It’ll surely be a scene reserved for the rival program in Los Angeles that’s almost always played the role of Big Brother in L.A.’s college football hierarchy. That, of course, would be USC, the blue blood football factory down the road with the 11 claimed national titles and 8 Heisman Trophy winners. That media zoo is a scene that plays out regularly at USC, which was reportedly not interested in pursuing Iamaleava.

Now, Lincoln Riley won’t just be tasked with getting the Trojans back to their lofty status nationally, he’ll have to work even a little harder to win the battles for everything in his own city.

Sure, USC will still be USC with or without the presence of Iamaleava in Pasadena. But now everything changes with the whole recruiting dynamic, or at least that’s got to be what Foster is thinking and hoping will happen.

Now, talent from SEC country could be thinking, if Iamaleava can do what he did and maybe even succeed, then why not me? Then there’s the pull nationally that Iamaleava could affect, not to mention the game-changer he could be in getting California’s fertile talent base interested in UCLA football.

Iamaleava merely transferring to UCLA should have a ripple effect in the short term, and don’t even get us started on if he actually turns the Bruins into winners again. This is a whole new headache — there’s that word again — that Riley and USC will have to fight through while they fight their own battles in trying to get back to elite status.

Will Los Angeles, one of the world’s biggest cities, even be big enough for Iamaleava and Riley? That question suddenly in play will be answered in the coming months, and the bitter L.A. rivals will clash in their annual meeting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving (it’s on Nov. 29 this year, so mark your calendars).

It’ll surely be one of the most hyped, most anticipated and most scrutinized chapters of the UCLA-USC football rivalry. And, of course, that’ll be because of 1 young and impressionable college quarterback who turned college football on its ear this spring and forever changed how we look at the sport — and maybe not in the best way.

It happened, and the effects of the Iamaleava saga will continue to reverberate in Knoxville and Pasadena for weeks, months and maybe even a few years. For Heupel’s program that Iamaleava left in the lurch, it’ll be about shaking the whole ordeal off, picking up the pieces and finding a new starting quarterback — maybe even Aguilar, who has thrown for over 3,000 yards the past 2 seasons, albeit in the Sun Belt Conference at Appalachian State.

And 2,174 miles from Rocky Top, where Iamaleava could’ve made his legend, and about an hour from his Long Beach roots, Iamaleava will be carving out his new college football life at one of the most beautiful backdrops the sports world has to offer. The Rose Bowl is that flat-out gorgeous, especially at sunset, and UCLA can only hope that when Utah arrives at the historic stadium in Pasadena for the season opener on Aug. 30 that it’s the start of a beautiful relationship.

We don’t live in a perfect world right now, and the college football world is far from perfect, too, as the Iamaleava saga itself showed in all of its carnage. We’re not going to get that dream UCLA-Tennessee matchup either because we don’t live in a scripted world. 

The scripts are written for Hollywood, a stone’s throw from where Iamaleava will soon be throwing his passes. Iamaleava is going to have to write his own script at UCLA, no matter how much less talent might be surrounding him than the roster he left in Knoxville, and no matter how much less NIL money he backed himself into because he wanted to squeeze more from Tennessee.

Just a few months from now, if fans can wait that long, the 2025 season will present one of the most unique dynamics the sport has ever seen in having 2 mega-hyped quarterback situations. There was already Arch Manning taking over at Texas, and now we have Iamaleava, who shed his shade of SEC orange for a shot in the new-age Big Ten.

Did a golden arm drop in UCLA’s lap or just a heavy load of fool’s gold? And in the end, will all of this be worth it for Iamaleava, who will turn 21 just 3 days after presumably playing his first game in blue and gold?

By the end of that UCLA-USC game in about 7 months, we’ll likely know the answer, and naturally, it could all land somewhere in between. 

No matter how it all turns out, this isn’t a dream. It’s all very real, and it’s the best example of our new crazy college football reality in 2025.

That picturesque Pasadena backdrop beckons, and everybody will be watching from near and far, including from the land of those checkered-board end zones that Iamaleava left behind.