Tit for tat ...

... or, you know, Nico for Joey.

Welcome to the latest episode in that wildest of Wild West Shows, "Transfer Portal Shenanigans," brought to you by Subway, All-State and whatever college athletics is now. In this edition, major-league college football and basketball's inertial movement toward full professional status reached a new milestone yesterday:

The first actual player trade.

OK, so not a trade, exactly. The two schools involved were not, well, involved in the deal (at least that we know of). But it amounted to tomato, to-mah-to.

What happened was, Nico Iamaleava transferred from Tennessee to UCLA, on account of Tennessee wouldn't rework his NIL deal and said "There's the door, son."

After which a kid named Joey Aguilar, freshly arrived in L.A. from Appalachian State, transferred from UCLA to Tennessee.

Needless to say, both Nico and Joey are quarterbacks. And thus, voila, a quarterback-for-quarterback trade. Of sorts.

And, sure, it was bound to happen sometime, given the way players are portaling from hither to yon like Captain Kirk transporting down to do battle with the Gorn. You say the old alma mater just landed the 2-guard everyone in America was after? Well, say goodbye to your current 2-guard, then. He's leaping into the portal for parts unknown, where his arrival will cause that school's 2-guard to leap into the portal, and ...

And so on and so forth.

In this particular case, it remains to be seen which school got the better end of their quarterback swap. Iamaleava (which, it just occurred to me, could be pronounced "I-am-a-leave(e)-a"), who still has three years of eligibility, threw for 2,616 yards and 19 touchdowns and ran for 358 yards and three more scores for a Tennessee team that went 10-2 and reached the College Football Playoff, where it was washed by eventual national champion Ohio State.

And Aguilar?

In the last two seasons at App State, he threw for 6,760 yards and 56 touchdowns before transferring to UCLA (and his home state of California) in the winter portal. Then Iamaleava showed up, and he was gone before he'd even learned the UCLA fight song.

(The fight song is called either "Sons of Westwood" or "Bruin Warriors", in case you were wondering. And you were, because why else would you read the Blob unless it was to obtain valuable knowledge like that?)

Anyway, Aguilar is headed for the place Iamaleava just, well, left. It's probably unfair to use the word "fled" to describe his departure, because that would imply Joey was afraid of competing for the job with the new arrival. On the other hand, it's perhaps not unfair to imply that.

Then again ...

Then again, maybe Joey thinks he looks better in orange than he does in powder-blue-and-gold. And maybe he thinks "Sons of Westwood/Bruin Warriors" blows because he's always harbored a secret love for "Rocky Top", playing it over and over late at night on his MP3 when everyone else was asleep.

Hey. Stranger things have happened.

And will continue to happen, clearly.