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4 hours ago
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ESPN's Rece Davis has made his thoughts known regarding how Nico Iamaleava's transfer portal process played out.
Despite Iamaleava landing with the UCLA Bruins on Easter Sunday following a rather abrupt Knoxville exit last week, Iamaleava isn't out of the woods yet regarding regaining respect in the college football community.
Davis was critical of Iamaleava during a recent edition of the "College GameDay Podcast," revealing how much his father was a bad apple throughout the ordeal.
"There’s a way to conduct business and there’s a way not to conduct business,” Davis said. “And, in my judgement, Nico Iamaleava and his representatives, which include his father and other agents, handled this as ham-handedly and as poorly as you can possibly imagine.”
Davis implied the Iamaleava camp was playing with house money without recognizing the light at the end of the tunnel: quarterback development instead of top-dollar treatment.
"They didn’t have the leverage that they thought they had," he explained. "They didn’t have a landing spot, which you need to have a landing spot before you go in and start demanding extra money. And, the other thing is that they came off as extraordinarily ungrateful in all of this, which is also a damage to your reputation."
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Davis cited other factors in Iamaleava's decision-making despite describing him as "wildly talented."
"Nico either was not interested or did not quite have the internal strength to stand up to his circle and say this is not the way we’re going to do business."
Unfortunately for both sides, talks backfired. Both have since parted ways, and if the ongoing story has redefined college football in at least one way, the presence of NIL can no longer be ignored.
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