Texas football: Steve Sarkisian addresses Nico Iamaleava situation, transfer portal issues (2025)

This spring, there have been plenty of storylines associated with the Texas football team.

What will the offense look like now that Arch Manning is finally QB1? Can Texas replace the talent it lost on its offensive and defensive lines? The return of Duane Akina notwithstanding, what is UT getting with the new assistant coaches it hired this offseason?

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But none of those storylines — no, not even Arch's — has grabbed the nation's attention like what happened at Tennessee over the weekend.

On Saturday, Tennessee went through a public breakup with Nico Iamaleava after the team's starting quarterback reportedly asked for a better NIL package and skipped a practice during the contract discussions. The divorce left Tennessee looking for a new quarterback, Iamaleava looking for a new home and college football looking for answers as to how the fallout from this story will impact an ever-changing landscape.

Steve Sarkisian: Nico Iamaleava situation is 'a tough one'

Not surprisingly, Texas coach Steve Sarkisian was paying attention to the news this weekend. And after the Longhorns wrapped up their 10th practice of the spring on Monday, Sarkisian was asked to share his thoughts.

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"It's a tough one. I think it's a difficult one for Nico and his family. It's a difficult one for coach (Josh) Heupel and Tennessee and what they're trying to do," Sarkisian said. "Ultimately, we all only have so much money to operate within, and we're all trying to build a team. That's one of the beautiful things about football, it's the ultimate team sport.

"It's no different than if you were in the NFL, sometimes when your hand gets forced and you only have so much money that you can allocate, you have to do what's best for the team. I think Tennessee has made that decision from what I can tell, I haven't talked to Josh, but from what I can tell, and in Nico's camp and in their opinion, they're trying to do what's best for the young man."

Iamaleava threw 19 touchdowns and five interceptions as a freshman last year for Tennessee.

"But this is what we've created, right?" Sarkisian said. "We've created this environment. This was going to come to a head at some point, it was just a matter of which school was it going to happen with first."

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When a question was posed about how he'd deal with a similar situation, Sarkisian reminded reporters that he doesn't deal in hypotheticals. He's made that clear over the years.

After the query was rephrased and delved into when Sarkisian tells his players that it's time to focus on football instead of contracts, the coach replied that "Our situation is always evolving, right? I eventually have that meeting with our players. I don't think I'm at that space to have that meeting, right? We've got another portal window that's coming... I don't think I'm quite in the position to do that yet, but there will come a time we have that meeting where our focus has got to be on the right things if they want to play as good a football as they can play."

Steve Sarkisian on transfer portal-related issues

In the 2023 recruiting class, Iamaleava ranked second among all quarterbacks. Iamaleava now joins Dante Moore (UCLA), Jackson Arnold (Oklahoma) and Malachi Nelson (USC) among the top-five quarterbacks in that class who are no longer with the teams they originally signed with. Nelson is now at his third school.

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The outlier among the Class of 2023's top-tier quarterbacks is Manning, who waited his turn behind Quinn Ewers for two years. Last week, Manning told the local media that "I want to be the quarterback at the University of Texas, so sometimes it's worth the wait."

But each of these circumstances is, well, circumstantial. Manning had his reasons to stay and the others had valid reasons to leave. Sarkisian chafed on Monday at the idea of another transfer window opening this week and he decried a system that forced former UT backup quarterback Maalik Murphy to decide ahead of the 2023 College Football Playoff if he'd rather remain with the Longhorns or enter the transfer portal in an attempt to find a new home while there were more available vacancies.

"None of that makes sense to me," Sarkisian said of Murphy's situation. "It didn't make sense to me then. It doesn't make sense to me now, but that's what we created. If we're going to do anything to help the players and the student-athletes and help the programs, we've got to look at this model and see where we can improve it, and do it in a way where there's some teeth involved. Because if not, there's just going to be another lawsuit and the whole thing is going to fall apart again, and we're going to go back to square one."

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Sarkisian, who took a trip to Washington, D.C., last week to talk with lawmakers about the state of college athletics, said that communication between the staff and players is key when it comes to roster management. "We try to communicate on a high level of where they're at, where they can improve, what we envision their journey looking like short-term and long-term," the coach said.

For Sarkisian, selling the process has also been key for roster retention. And that applies to all positions, not just quarterbacks.

"We had 11 draft picks a year ago. We sent 14 guys to the (NFL) Combine this year, we'll see how many get drafted next week. It's not the product that you are today, it's the finished product of where you end up being," Sarkisian said. "I think when they can see images like themselves grow and have more and more success, it's a lot easier to trust that process. Early on, man, it was kind of selling vapor to them that wasn't even existing yet.

"Everybody wants to have success. And it's them understanding maybe sometimes why there isn't the immediate success, but that the success will come if you trust the process that we're putting in front of them."

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Last year, starting cornerback Terrance Brooks was among the Longhorns who jumped into the transfer portal during the spring window. Reserve receiver Freddie Dubose has already announced that he will leave the Longhorns and look to continue his career elsewhere when this spring's portal window officially opens Wednesday.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Nico Iamaleava: Texas football coach discusses recent drama