Florida extends offer to 5-star quarterback Nico Iamaleava

Downey (Calif.) Warren five-star quarterback Nico Iamaleava is hoping to wrap up his recruitment this spring and, ideally, before the calendar turns to June.

He already has released a top schools list and has seemingly narrowed that list down to a few select schools.

That doesn’t mean one team might not try and sweep in during the final stretch. Florida extended a scholarship offer to Iamaleava last night, according to his Instagram page.

  
 
 
 
 
 
 
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The On3 Consensus – a complete and equally weighted industry-generated average that utilizes all four major recruiting media companies – has Iamaleava as the No. 5 overall recruit in the country. The only quarterbacks ranked ahead of him are New Orleans Isidore Newman Five-Star Plus+ quarterback Arch Manning and Los Alamitos (Calif.) Five-Star Plus+ quarterback Malachi Nelson.

“The 6-foot-6, 200-pounder has a strong case as the top pure arm talent in the cycle. Iamaleava has palpable arm strength that particularly jumps out in in-person evaluations. He has a tight throwing motion for a taller prospect with longer arms and the ball jumps out of his hand. Iamaleava also moves well and shows the ability to pick up some yards when the play breaks down,” On3 Director of Scouting and Rankings Charles Power recently said.

Iamaleava currently has an On3 NIL Valuation of $63k. The On3 NIL Valuation is an index that looks to set the standard market value for both high school and college-level athletes. The NIL valuation does not act as a tracker of the value of NIL deals an athlete has completed to date. It rather signifies an athlete’s value at a certain moment in time.

Tennessee is the current favorite for Nico Iamaleava

According to the On3 Recruiting Prediction Machine (RPM), Tennessee is the current favorite for Nico Iamaleava.

The five-star quarterback visited the school over the weekend and was blown away by the fans at Rocky Top who cheered for him at a basketball game and painted a campus landmark in his honor.

“I thought the hospitality was great — that southern hospitality definitely is real,” Iamaleava told On3’s Chad Simmons. “The people down south in Knoxville were great people all around.”

RPM was released to the public in December. The On3 engineering group teamed up with Spiny.ai to create the industry’s first algorithm and machine learning-based product to predict where athletes will attend college. 

It factors in machine learning, expert predictions, social sentiment, visits, and historical trends. However, expert predictions are still a big piece of the RPM equation.