WATCH: Tennessee fans go wild as Nico Iamaleava acknowledges 'We want Nico' chant
Tennessee wants Downey (Calif.) Warren five-star quarterback Nico Iamaleava.
They are letting him know it in as many ways as they can.
It started Thursday night by painting The Rock, a campus landmark, in honor of Nico and writing “We Want Nico.” It’s even been painted on the Rock a second time since then.
Then on Saturday, Iamaleava attended the Volunteers men’s basketball game against Arkansas. During the game, fans started chanting “We want Nico.” Iamaleava, who was sitting by the orange tarp in the video, stood up and acknowledged the chants, which sent people into a frenzy.
Iamaleava visited the school during the football season and came away impressed with the environment. He is likely feeling the exact same way right now.
“The atmosphere was wild like you would expect at any SEC game,” Iamaleava told On3’s Chad Simmons after his November visit to Knoxville. “The fans are crazy over their team and I think that is something anybody would look forward to. Knowing their fans are going to go crazy every play is exciting.”
Nico Iamaleava would be a program-defining commitment for Tennessee
The On3 Consensus – a complete and equally weighted industry-generated average that utilizes all four major recruiting media companies – has the 6-foot-6 quarterback as the No. 5 overall recruit in the country.
He 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.
A player of his skills and fame would be a huge pickup for the Volunteers, but they are not the current favorites. Oregon currently has a 51.0% chance of landing Iamaleava, according to the On3 Recruiting Prediction Machine (RPM). Tennessee is in third place with a 12.5% chance.
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.