Tennessee receiver Mike Matthews entered the transfer portal on Saturday night shortly before the winter portal window closed, On3’s Hayes Fawcett first reported.
Matthews is the sixth Tennessee receiver to enter the transfer portal this month, joining Kaleb Webb, Chas Nimrod, Nathan Leacock, Nate Spillman and Squirrel White.
A former five-star recruit, Tennessee expected Matthews to be a major piece of the puzzle in 2025 as the Vols look to rebuild their receiver core after a lackluster 2024 season and a mass exodus to the portal over the last month.
Matthews played in the final 11 games of his freshman season after an injury sidelined him for the start of the year. Serving as Bru McCoy’s backup for most of the season, Matthews caught seven passes for 90 yards and two touchdowns.
More From RTI: Former Tennessee Running Back Announces Transfer Destination
The Lilburn, Georgia native’s best game of the season came against Vanderbilt when he caught three passes for 30 yards and a touchdown. Totaling 199 snaps over the course of the season, Matthews totaled a 61.1 PFF grade that ranked fourth amongst Tennessee receivers that played over 100 snaps.
With Matthews gone, Tennessee has just two returning scholarship players at receiver in Chris Brazzell and Braylon Staley.
Brazzell was a starter for Tennessee in 2024 but was disappointing in his first year after transferring in from Tulane, catching just 29 passes for 333 yards and two touchdowns. Staley caught three passes for 21 yards in his freshman season at Tennessee.
The Vols signed three prep receivers earlier this month including four-stars Travis Smith and Radarious Jackson as well as three-star Joakim Dodson.
Josh Heupel and his staff will have to be overly active in the transfer portal in the coming weeks to put a competent receiver core on the field for Nico Iamaleava in 2025.
7 Responses
1 transfer or an academic transfer no NIL deals for transfers. Why would someone getting to play leave a successful and building team?
Wake-up and cancel the transfer portal, it is destroying college athletics along with the coaches sanity.
Transfer portal, terrible idea for fans and coaches!
Sorry but Nico is no good. Not sure how he was named best quarterback in the country? He can’t throw down the field He’s introverted. Never see him talking to got anyone and he sits on the bench talking to no one and on the field He’s shows no motivation
Why? Why are we losing so many wide receivers?
Transfer needs to go. It’s going to ruin collage ball even high school sports UT QB isn’t any good way over hyped got the money forgot how to play
A lot of ppl are saying inaccurate stuff about Nico. If not for having just over 2 seconds before being hit (off. line not blocking) and not having any time to go through his reads, not to mention our receivers having so many drops and not being coached up by Kelsey Pope (rec. coach) and Halzle not calling the games in hyper mode and trying to slow it down by huddling, how does anyone expect Nico to be successful. Go back and look at Hooker’s 2 years. How many times did UT huddle? Or even Milton? They didn’t except to run clock after leading at crunch time. Golesh went rapid fire and so did Josh…they teach fast then try to control the clock and not give the young man a chance. Pope and Halzle need to be demoted at best, and let the head coach call the games…until they do or get another OC and RC, Tennessee won’t be the place that Nico committed to, and the recievering core will continue to leave as well.