Arkansas Football Demanding QB Madden Iamaleava Repay $200,000 In NIL Money After Transferring Before Ever Playing For The Razorbacks

Seems fair, no?

The power in college football seems to have been flipped on its head after the Supreme Court paved the way for athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness back in 2021.

The result was an arms race, with schools rushing to build up NIL collectives to provide their athletes the opportunity to make money and hopefully entice the best players. While schools still can’t directly pay their players, there are “amateur” athletes making millions of dollars and getting fancy sports cars from donors and collectives in order for schools to recruit the best players.

With college football turning into a business now, we’ve already seen “contract disputes” arise over NIL, like last year when UNLV starting quarterback Matt Sluka announced on Twitter that he would be redshirting the rest of the season to preserve his final remaining year of eligibility, apparently due to a dispute with the university over his NIL deal. And with the transfer portal allowing athletes to transfer schools without penalty, the result is bidding wars between schools and players demanding insane NIL deals to uphold their commitments to their university.

Up to this point, it seems that players have held all the cards, being able to transfer at will or hold programs hostage for more money under the threat of transfer without penalty. And a lot of people seem to be ok with that, arguing that coaches are allowed to leave whenever they want so players should be able to as well.

But the big difference in players and coaches is that if a coach leaves, it’s either because they were fired, at the end of their contract, or they had to pay a sizeable buyout to the school in order to break their agreement. Players, up to this point, haven’t faced any consequences for backing out of their NIL deals with schools, and often use their current deals as leverage for bigger payouts from other schools.

It seems the schools have finally had enough though.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen schools starting to push back on demands from players, like Tennessee parting ways with starting quarterback Nico Iamaleava after he demanded that his NIL deal be increased from $2 million to $4 million in order for him to stay with the Vols. After reports surfaced that Nico was demanding a raise (which his family denied), the quarterback sat out of practice and ghosted his team, and rather than paying up to keep his quarterback, Coach Josh Heupel announced that the Volunteers would be parting ways with Iamaleava and going in a different direction.

Nico entered the transfer portal and ultimately ended up at UCLA, where he reportedly took a pay cut from what he was making at Tennessee and got nowhere near the $4 million he was demanding to stay in Knoxville. (Although after he transferred, his family claimed that it wasn’t about the money and was more about the offense…which still doesn’t explain why he would transfer to a school with a significantly worse offense).

That was just the tip of the spear though, because after Nico transferred to UCLA, his brother Madden also announced that he would be joining the Bruins, who he had originally committed to before ultimately signing with Arkansas.

Sounds like a family that keeps their word, no?

Madden Iamaleava enrolled at Arkansas in January as a freshman, but ultimately never suited up for a game and never took a snap for the Razorbacks after staying in Fayetteville for less than 4 months. But hey, he got his NIL money so that’s all that matters, right?

Well not so fast, because now Arkansas’ football collective is reportedly demanding that Madden repay $200,000 for his breach of contract.

According to Amanda Christovich of Front Office Sports, the Arkansas NIL collective has sent demand letters to two former players for violating the terms of their agreement.

And while it wasn’t confirmed that one of those went to Madden Iamaleava, On3 reports that the collective is seeking to recoup the $200k from the freshman QB.

This comes after Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek said yesterday that he supported the collective in their efforts to enforce their rights under the agreements:

“I have spoken with the leadership team at Arkansas Edge and expressed my support in their pursuit to enforce their rights under any agreement violated by our student-athletes moving forward. We appreciate Edge’s investment in our student-athletes and acknowledge the enforcement of these agreements is vital in our new world of college athletics. We look forward to continued dialogue with all parties in resolving these matters.”