Nico Iamaleava on Tennessee's loss to Arkansas: 'We've still got everything ahead of us'

Amid a week of upsets, the Tennessee Volunteers dropped a road game to the Arkansas Razorbacks. Despite that, quarterback Nico Iamaleava knows that the team’s goals are still ahead of them.

Among those goals for Tennessee are competing for the SEC Championship and the College Football Playoff this season. Those aren’t opportunities lost because of one loss on the field, as Iamaleava emphasized.

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“Yeah, like Heup [head coach Josh Heupel] said we’ve still got everything ahead of us,” Nico Iamaleava said. “We’ve still got all our goals ahead of us. We’ve got to use this as fuel to get us better for the rest of the season.”

The game itself was a frustrating one for Tennessee and Iamaleava. The Volunteers only managed to score 14 points on the game and for his part, Iamaleava was 16 for 28 for 156 passing yards. He also had 11 rushes for 17 yards, with sack yardage coming off his rushing total. The game also ended when he failed to throw the ball into the end zone and instead scrambled as time expired.

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The bright spot for the Volunteers offense was running back Dylan Sampson, who had 140 yards rushing and both of the team’s touchdowns.

In the wake of the loss, Paul Finebaum also shared his thoughts on the game.

“I didn’t predict this one right either but let me tell you. This was easier to see because you just had this nagging feeling that that’s a nasty place to be at night. 12 o’clock in the afternoon? No. It proved to be. Against Arkansas? It wasn’t going to take much to beat them. Just manufacture some points and they couldn’t do it,” Finebaum said.

“This Tennessee team that we bought because they beat an absolutely miserable NC State team and a good Oklahoma team just nowhere to be found? Nico looked like a young player, not a Heisman candidate that so many tried to make him out to be. It feels a little aberrational.”

Even amid those issues, as Nico Iamaleava said, Tennessee has its goals ahead. The only SEC school without a loss in conference play to this point is Texas, so the race for the conference championship is wide open. Then, in an expanded College Football Playoff field, one loss won’t keep a team from getting in.

Still, Tennessee will need to bounce back quickly with a rivalry game against Florida coming up next weekend.