The University of Tennessee is immersed in another NCAA investigation of potential rules violations that is “major” in nature, sources tell Sports Illustrated. The case involves multiple sports and includes scrutiny of name, image and likeness (NIL) benefits for athletes.
The Volunteers were penalized last summer for more than 200 rules infractions in the football program. The NCAA Committee on Infractions declared that the case was “one of the worst the COI has seen,” with 18 Level I violations that included around $60,000 in impermissible inducements and benefits for recruits. Now the school is back in the NCAA’s crosshairs, a recurrence that could have significant consequences.
Details are scarce on what Tennessee is potentially facing in the latest case, including the number of involved sports. The school acknowledged the investigation to SI, but declined further comment, other than to say it has not received a notice of allegations from NCAA Enforcement.
The NCAA also declined comment in a statement to SI. “With rare exceptions, the NCAA does not comment on current, pending or potential investigations due to confidentiality rules put in place by member schools,” associate director of communications Meghan Durham Wright said.
A source familiar with the inquiry tells SI that Tennessee does not believe it has committed any violations in the NIL realm. The source cited NCAA guidance in that evolving area as “vague and contradictory.”
The Volunteers have one of the most prominent NIL collective programs in the country, the Volunteer Club, which is operated by Knoxville-based Spyre Sports Group. The Volunteer Club said it had more than 4,000 members as of early December, and the Knoxville News-Sentinel reported in September that Spyre Sports had struck deals with Tennessee athletes in 11 sports. It’s unclear whether any of those agreements are targets of the NCAA inquiry.
The most noteworthy NIL deal at Tennessee is believed to be with quarterback Nico Iamaleava, a five-star Class of 2023 recruit from California. The Athletic reported in 2022 that a five-star high school junior had agreed to a contract that could pay him up to $8 million, but it did not name the recruit or the school he would attend. Subsequent reports speculated Iamaleava was that player; neither he nor his family have confirmed or denied he was the player mentioned in The Athletic story. In March 2023, Iamaleava was a publicized pitch man for Force Factor, a supplement company.
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Iamaleava was Tennessee’s backup quarterback in 2023, appearing in five games and accounting for 385 total yards and five touchdowns. He started for the Volunteers in their Cheez-It Citrus Bowl victory over Iowa, accounting for four touchdowns, and is regarded as the program’s rising star for 2024.
Despite the egregious nature of the football violations in the previous case, the Committee on Infractions chose not to hit Tennessee with a postseason ban for the 2023 season, citing a relatively recent aversion within the NCAA membership to penalizing athletes who were not involved or implicated in the infractions. The committee said it was following membership guidance and “reserving postseason bans for Level I cases that lack exemplary cooperation” by the school under investigation. Tennessee was given credit for exemplary cooperation in that case, having fired then-coach Jeremy Pruitt and performed an extensive in-house investigation.
Many believed that signaled the end of the NCAA doling out postseason bans, which had been considered the harshest penalties at the NCAA’s disposal. But could that change in this instance, in what could be a blatant “repeat violator” case? That’s the NCAA’s nomenclature for a school that commits a Level I or II violation within five years of starting a penalty from a previous violation—and this would be two cases in a much shorter period of time.
Instead of a postseason ban last year, the NCAA administered other sanctions to Tennessee. The school was fined more than $8 million—the equivalent of two years of bowl revenue—had a long list of recruiting restrictions and vacated 11 victories in 2019 and ‘20. Pruitt was given a six-year show-cause penalty that should make him all but impossible to hire at the NCAA level during that time period.
After receiving criticism for being unable to make the rules stick in the NIL/transfer portal era, this is at least the second significant case NCAA Enforcement has advanced to the point of potential sanctions. Earlier in January, the NCAA and Florida State reached a negotiated resolution on an infractions case that resulted in a three-game suspension for a Seminoles assistant coach and a three-year disassociation from the FSU athletic program for a booster connected to the Rising Spear collective.
