For most of Tennessee quarterback Nico Iamaleava’s life, heading north meant going to Los Angeles.
Not this weekend.
One of the most intriguing storylines to Saturday night’s College Football Playoff showdown (8 on ESPN) between the ninth-seeded Volunteers and eighth-seeded Ohio State in Columbus is how the 6-foot-6, 215-pound redshirt freshman from Southern California, specifically Long Beach, will handle a midwestern icebox days before Christmas.
According to the Weather.com forecast, Columbus will have a high of 29 degrees Saturday and a low of 16.
“I think that’s more about you guys,” a smiling Iamaleava said Tuesday in a news conference when asked about the topic. “I will be ready to go play in whatever weather we get. I played in the snow one time when I was in Chicago a couple of years ago with my 7-on-7 team, and that was probably the coldest I’ve played in.
“It was pretty hard to play in the snow.”
Snow is not predicted for Saturday. Just bitter, bitter cold.
“It will be cold out there, but we’ve played in cold games before,” Vols offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Joey Halzle said. “It was snowing here last week. You go out there, and it’s cold in pregame. Then you start playing, and, man, you don’t feel it anymore.
“You go out and play at a high level. There should be good field conditions, so it’s not going to be a wet track or anything like that. It’s not something we’re harping on. It’s the playoffs. Let’s go play.”
Halzle said the focus has instead been on throwing and catching the ball and handling it well on the exchanges from center Cooper Mays to Iamaleava and from Iamaleava to Dylan Sampson and the other running backs.
Of course, having a comfortable ball to grip also will factor into Halzle’s objectives for an offense that ranks eighth nationally with 462.9 yards a game with the help of stat-padding outcomes against Kent State (740) and UTC (718).
“We’ve got everything under the sun that you’re allowed to have down there to keep the guys’ hands warm and the balls warm,” Halzle said. “I don’t think that will be an issue, and we’ll try not to sub the ball as much as possible, because when you sub the ball, you’ve got to slow down. We’ll try to do that as little as possible.
“If it calls for that, Nico always knows that anything weather-wise that happens to where he doesn’t like the ball, he’ll just signal and call for a new one and get a new ball.”
Iamaleava will head to Ohio State having completed 199 of 303 passes (65.7%) for 2,512 yards with 19 touchdowns and five interceptions. He is Tennessee’s first quarterback since Casey Clausen in 2003 to win 10 games in a regular season — Hendon Hooker won nine two years ago before suffering his season-ending ACL tear in the 11th contest at South Carolina — and he may be coming off his most meaningful performance.
In the 36-23 win at Vanderbilt that punched Tennessee’s ticket to a CFP berth, the Commodores returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown and reached the end zone again after Sampson fumbled on his team’s second play from scrimmage. Iamaleava then led the Vols to a five-play, 73-yard drive that culminated with a 28-yard scoring strike to Dont’e Thornton to quickly make it 14-7.
Iamaleava would finish with four touchdown tosses.
“It’s our third snap of the game, and it’s 14-0,” Halzle said. “I asked on the headset, because I’m up top, ‘How do we look down there?’ To a man, every coach was like, ‘We’re good. Nobody’s blinking, because they all know what’s about to happen.’ That drive was huge, and that was a good representation of where we are as an offense and where he’s at as a quarterback.”
Said Iamaleava: “It was still early in the game. We were never really worried. We knew what we had to do.”
Top of the heap
The 2023 class of national signees had five quarterbacks ranked among the top 15 prospects — Arch Manning, Iamaleava, Dante Moore, Jackson Arnold and Malachi Nelson.
Iamaleava has been the most successful so far with 13 consecutive starts and an 11-2 record in those games. Manning has certainly showed promise as the backup to Quinn Ewers at Texas, but the other three have already experienced the NCAA transfer portal.
Arnold recently left Oklahoma after two seasons that contained 10 starts and signed with Auburn, while Moore made five starts at UCLA last season before transferring to Oregon and spending this year as Dillon Gabriel’s backup. Nelson already has stops at Southern California and Boise State, playing in four total games, and is in the portal again.
Sarcasm alert
Vols head coach Josh Heupel was asked whether Tennessee could employ any new wrinkles in this three-week gap between games or if teams simply are what they are at this point.
“We have nothing new defensively, offensively or on special teams,” Heupel said. “We’ll do exactly what we’ve done.”
Heupel then smiled.
‘Stormtrooper’ return
The Vols will wear white jerseys and white pants at Ohio State, marking the fifth time they will have displayed their “Stormtrooper” look this season.
Tennessee is 3-1 in that combination, having defeated North Carolina State, Oklahoma and Vanderbilt, and having lost at Georgia.
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com.