[The Athletic] ‘Loyal to whom?’ A coaching exit can trigger a player exodus, but two desert stars took a different path

[Icege]

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Excerpts below:

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Arizona won 10 games last season and finished 11th in the final Associated Press poll. Its head coach left for another job. And its starting quarterback and the All-American wideout – the two most prominent and promising players on the roster – turned down millions of dollars in Name, Image and Likeness inducements from other schools to stay instead of transferring. That loyalty is partly why they’re featured on the Bowman Chrome line, per the Topps rep monitoring the signing, and it’s the reason anyone else would be here, too. They created a rift in college sports reality.

Now, in a world with a 12-team playoff, they have a viable chance at altering a program’s history. But their decision to stay wasn’t about choosing nothing when confronted with everything. Not when you can make more than $3,000 signing collectibles for 75 minutes. It was about relationships, culture, finishing something and even how a fortune cookie can compete with the mass market.

It’s about the faith that taking a little less can lead to more. Because there’s Tetairoa McMillan, he of the ball skills that make NFL franchises swoon, walking out the front door of his buddy’s townhouse at sunset. He’d just put his signature on 400-plus Topps cards of his own.

“I always tell everybody,” McMillan says, sitting inside Arizona Stadium a few hours earlier, “I turned down seven figures to make eight.”

 

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Because other programs had the means and motivation to change minds. “There was life-changing money there,” Les Fifita says.

But Desert Takeover, Arizona’s NIL arm, was not idle in the hours after Fisch’s departure and before Brent Brennan’s arrival. “There was already a concerted effort to do everything they could to keep (Fifita and McMillan) here,” Brennan says. “Those wheels started to spin really fast.” However they got there, Fifita and McMillan appear to have tapped into the NIL market enough in Tucson to offset the dollar signs flashed at them elsewhere. Their podcast is sponsored by Crest Insurance. They have a deal with a private jet company, Alerion Aviation. McMillan is an ambassador for Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers and has set up a website to sell T-shirts and hoodies bearing his Nalo branding. (It stands for “Negative Attitudes Lose Opportunities.”) Fifita has stumped for SuperCuts and Tucson International Airport.

They’ve wound up doing OK right where they were.

But staying still required faith and good fortune, too.

 

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A slant route across the middle against no defenders. A perfect throw from Fifita bounces off McMillan’s hands and hits the grass of Arizona’s outdoor practice field. McMillan claps in frustration. Everyone else checks the skies for locusts. “That was like the most rare moment of all time,” Stukes says. “Everyone gasped. It was like watching Larry Fitzgerald drop a pass: ‘What just happened?’”

There are few things taken for granted in any program, anywhere. Noah Fifita throwing a pass that Tetairoa McMillan catches is one of them.

Of the 241 passes Fifita completed in 2023, 68 were caught by McMillan. A full 1,010 of Fifita’s 2,869 total passing yards arrived via connections to McMillan. A relationship that began in eighth grade has developed into a sort of supernatural rapport. “How many passes has Noah Fifita thrown to T-Mac? Five thousand? Ten thousand?” Brennan says. “They’ve known each other since they were 14. You throw that many balls to one guy, there’s going to be trust. A sixth sense, so to speak.”

 

 

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The results to date are as expected, if also a bit mercurial. McMillan hauled in a school-record 304 receiving yards in a Week 1 runaway against New Mexico, but he caught just two balls as No. 20 Arizona scraped past Northern Arizona in Week 2. (The Wildcats, a 33.5-point favorite, trailed at the half.) Fifita ranks 21st nationally with an efficiency rating of 174.53 through two games, and four of his five touchdown passes have landed in McMillan’s hands. And here come back-to-back road games at No. 14 Kansas State and No. 12 Utah, a Big 12 championship favorite. These are not merely important games to define a season trajectory – Fifita and McMillan could have found those anywhere. These are opportunities they valued more than robust NIL payouts, because said opportunities can only happen where they are: games that can forge a new football paradigm in the desert.

“I guess you can call us crazy, but we like to choose the hard path,” McMillan says. “People don’t realize, with this team, we’re trying to do something different over here.”

 

Fun story about McMillan-Fifita's friendship and how they opted to remain in Arizona instead of taking a bunch of money to go to Washington (it helped that they were already taking a bunch of money in Arizona). Here's to hoping that all of that time with Fifita has gotten T-Mac/Nalo ready for Bryce's style of play!

Edited 8 hours ago by Icege

[LinvilleGorge]

I only watched two Arizona games both last season and this season so I'm working off of an admittedly small sample size but Fifita really seemed to go backwards this season. You could see the limitations in his game last year but he seemed to be doing a pretty decent job of getting the most out of his abilities. He just didn't look good at all this year in the games that I watched. 

[Icege]

1 minute ago, LinvilleGorge said:

I only watched two Arizona games both last season and this season so I'm working off of an admittedly small sample size but Fifita really seemed to go backwards this season. You could see the limitations in his game last year but he seemed to be doing a pretty decent job of getting the most out of his abilities. He just didn't look good at all this year in the games that I watched. 

I wonder if it was a combination of size + scheme? Being a shorter QB, Fifita has to be a film junkie for when those sight-lines go missing because somebody twice his size just appeared out of nowhere. Just getting one year in an offense is tough on any QB, but then throw in having to overcome other pain points that other QBs don't deal with...

Babers' offense was also RPO-heavy and relied a lot on speed at WR but they were working with Fisch's recruits that were intended to be in an offense that used motion, personnel groupings, etc to create mismatches. Look at 2023 Fifita + T-Mac highlights and they look like different players.

That 2023 tape gives me a loooooot of good feels thinking about Bryce throwing some of those balls.

[LinvilleGorge]

8 minutes ago, Icege said:

I wonder if it was a combination of size + scheme? Being a shorter QB, Fifita has to be a film junkie for when those sight-lines go missing because somebody twice his size just appeared out of nowhere. Just getting one year in an offense is tough on any QB, but then throw in having to overcome other pain points that other QBs don't deal with...

Babers' offense was also RPO-heavy and relied a lot on speed at WR but they were working with Fisch's recruits that were intended to be in an offense that used motion, personnel groupings, etc to create mismatches. Look at 2023 Fifita + T-Mac highlights and they look like different players.

That 2023 tape gives me a loooooot of good feels thinking about Bryce throwing some of those balls.

I honestly didn't watch enough of their games to comment. I just know that in '23 in the games that I watched I liked Fifita. Not as an NFL prospect but I thought he looked like a good college QB. Yeah, basically a poor man's Bryce. Then the games I watched this year it was just like "who is this guy? This can't be the same guy I liked last year."

@tukafan21 what's the deal? Did Fifita go significantly backwards or did I just happen to catch good '23 games and bad '24 games? 

[Panthero]

Didn't know washington had any NIL money to throw around. Guess it makes sense, given their history, but still surprised me. 

[tukafan21]

1 hour ago, LinvilleGorge said:

I honestly didn't watch enough of their games to comment. I just know that in '23 in the games that I watched I liked Fifita. Not as an NFL prospect but I thought he looked like a good college QB. Yeah, basically a poor man's Bryce. Then the games I watched this year it was just like "who is this guy? This can't be the same guy I liked last year."

@tukafan21 what's the deal? Did Fifita go significantly backwards or did I just happen to catch good '23 games and bad '24 games? 

It was a combination of Fifita regressing this year and losing the coaching staff we had in 23, now how much was his regression also directly due to the staff change or were they separate issues that then compounded each other, who knows.

Part of it was also that the new staff wasn't able to replace Jacob Cowing, who was a 4th round pick by the 49ers last year and in 23 tied T-Mac for I think it was 9th in the nation in catches with 90, or our TE Tanner McLachlan who was a 6th round pick by the Bengals.

Without that 2nd and 3rd legitimate receiving threat (plus, it didn't help that our running game was hurt because the Arizona RB who got drafted this year only played the first game of the season then eligibility questions popped up and he was out the rest of the season) our entire offense was built around T-Mac and it made game planning for opposing defenses very simple, throw everything and the kitchen sink at T-Mac and force Arizona to beat you through other players, which we couldn't do.

It didn't stop T-Mac from still putting up elite stats, but it severely hurt our team's offensive success, and thus, how Fifita looked.

I also made a long post in the main 40+ page T-Mac selection thread last night that touched on his summer injury and how it MIGHT have affected him this past season, as well as some of the Fifita and coaching change stuff if you want to go look at that one.  I never brought the injury up in all the draft discussions because I didn't want to look like I was making excuses for him, but I do think it somewhat affected him at times this year too.

[tukafan21]

1 hour ago, Panthero said:

Didn't know washington had any NIL money to throw around. Guess it makes sense, given their history, but still surprised me. 

Washington has a ton of NIL money, like a stupid amount, which is why the assumption was that T-Mac and the rest of our core group of players were going to follow Fisch to Washington.

Here is a good article that talks about that whole thing and why T-Mac (and Fifita) were the reason the majority of the team stayed in Tucson... https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/40918248/arizona-noah-fifita-aiming-big-12-championship-2024

And while it's not mentioned in that article above, it was known that T-Mac (and Fifita) told boosters to take some of the NIL they were offering the two of them to stay, and to spread it around to the other players to help keep as many players in town as possible.

Also... for anyone who was worried about the reports coming out in the days before the draft from McShay, as I said at the time, they were all complete crap and were staunchly refuted by all the Arizona insiders who know the team well.  The leading "theory" (and I put that in quotes because it's one of those, "we don't know, but we KNOW") as to where that came from was that it was Fisch.

Part of why he got/took the Washington job was that he sold them on being able to bring Fifita, T-Mac, and the other impact players with him to Washington and he wasn't happy when they stayed in Tucson.  He also has DEEP connections in the NFL world as that's where he spent most off is career and he was out there trying to make it sound like T-Mac fell off a cliff without him, out of spite.

Edited 4 hours ago by tukafan21

[LinvilleGorge]

11 minutes ago, tukafan21 said:

He also has DEEP connections in the NFL world as that's where he spent most off is career and he was out there trying to make it sound like T-Mac fell off a cliff without him, out of spite.

If he really did that I would avoid him like the plague if I was a recruit. So if things don't work out for me at Washington for whatever reason and I have to transfer and then blossom into an NFL prospect, you're gonna badmouth me to your NFL contacts? Nah, that ain't gonna work for me.

Obviously it didn't hurt T-Mac but if you're a mid-late round non-elite prospect that could be really damaging to your NFL prospects.

[tukafan21]

5 minutes ago, LinvilleGorge said:

If he really did that I would avoid him like the plague if I was a recruit. So if things don't work out for me at Washington for whatever reason and I have to transfer and then blossom into an NFL prospect, you're gonna badmouth me to your NFL contacts? Nah, that ain't gonna work for me.

You have no idea, Jedd Fisch is the definition of scumbag, I never even liked him when he was at Arizona and I celebrated when he left.

He's the definition of a snake oil salesman, just go look at his coaching history, all he does is jump around every year or two because he's all about himself and just isn't a well liked person so he quickly wears out his welcome.

A big reason most of the team stayed in Tucson was he built up this whole "family" mantra and recruited players who felt the same way, in particular, a very heavy Polynesian group of players who tend to value that.  When he left in the way he did, it really upset them because it was the opposite of everything he ever sold them on and what they stood for.

Which is why they stayed together, as a family, and lead by T-Mac (well, and Fifita, but you know what I mean, the two of them were the leaders of the band)

Edited 4 hours ago by tukafan21