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

TUCSON, Ariz. – After the four-digit code is punched in and the gate whirs open, there’s one last bit of direction from the voice on the other end of the line.

“It’s the last house on the right,” Noah Fifita says. “Where the BMW is.”

The black 740i with California plates isn’t hard to find amid a huddle of townhome apartments three miles due north of campus proper. A gated community, but only kind of. This fenced-off alcove is here for reasons known only to the developer. It feels like something fancy by accident.

Inside the house, past an absurdly tidy living room for a college student, Arizona’s sophomore quarterback has 20 minutes or so left in a card signing for Topps. He’ll go through about 600 in total. Fifita is one of the college football players expected to be featured on the forthcoming Bowman Chrome line this season, a group that includes his best friend and top target, likely future first-round NFL Draft pick Tetairoa McMillan.

The only thing unusual about this scene is that it’s taking place in Tucson.

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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On Dec. 28, 2023, Arizona beat Oklahoma in the Alamo Bowl by two touchdowns. A seventh consecutive victory – the fourth against ranked opponents in that span – came at the expense of the program with the sixth-most wins in college football history. These are significant optics for a school that has won 19 national championships overall but zero in football, that has lost as many bowl games as it has won, that has finished in the top 5 of the final AP college football poll exactly once. “I felt when that (Oklahoma) game was over, we were good enough to line up and play against anybody in the country,” says defensive coordinator Duane Akina. He’s on his third stint with the program, the first of which was a 14-year stretch under head coach Dick Tomey in the famed “Desert Swarm” era. “I don’t care what the name is.”

Less than three weeks later? A patch of quicksand in the desert.

Jedd Fisch, who’d led the Wildcats from one win to 10 in just three seasons, took the Washington head coaching position vacated by Kalen DeBoer as a result of the Nick Saban retirement butterfly effect. When the news broke, Fifita was in the midst of a haircut. McMillan, not shockingly, called immediately. Fifita had taken over as the primary quarterback in the fourth game of 2023 and threw for 2,800 yards and 25 touchdowns in his next nine outings. McMillan’s 1,402 receiving yards, meanwhile, ranked as the second-highest single-season total in school history.

They decided to meet at Rubio’s Coastal Grill off East Broadway Boulevard in Tucson to start the conversations that would determine the direction of their lives, never mind a football program.

Of course they did.

They met as eighth graders on the football fields at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, Calif. “That’s when my quarterback career went out the door,” McMillan says. The 14U team for the OC Buckeyes youth football program didn’t need a signal-caller – Noah Fifita was on the job – but it had plenty of room for a long, athletic kid with promising ball skills. On a trip to Las Vegas for a scrimmage, McMillan and Fifita grabbed Baskin-Robbins shakes and headed to the bowling alley at the Orleans Hotel. They didn’t roll a ball. They just talked. For hours. About everything.

They have been nearly inseparable since. They were part of a core that transformed Servite High School’s football program from a one-win team to state championship runner-up. They were playing basketball with friends and teammates on Signing Day in 2021 when McMillan, a top-50 prospect, took out his phone and showed everyone a photo of his national letter of intent to Arizona, confirming his commitment flip from Oregon. Wildcats linebacker Jacob Manu, another one of those OC Buckeyes, still has a video of the raucous celebration on his phone. “Even in high school, we would be on FaceTime all the time,” Fifita says of McMillan, noting their moms would tease them about how often the two were in contact. “That’s been my boy.”

And here, at the crest of another program-changing ride, came the biggest now-what of them all.

Following a team meeting to confirm Fisch’s departure, McMillan and Fifita avoided cameras outside the football facility by using a back door. They drove to Rubio’s. Once there, McMillan threw a blanket on the flames. He wasn’t going anywhere. “I feel like our job as people was to fulfill our legacy,” McMillan says now. Fifita was less sure. He wanted to stay with his best friend, but he didn’t sleep that night for a reason. He told his father he kept thinking about loyalty, and Les Fifita responded with an open-ended question that rang like a cathedral bell: Loyal to whom? The mixed emotions comprised all the emotions. “I literally did not know what the right answer was,” the Wildcats quarterback says.

The tension, for Arizona, was existential. With an immediate 30-day transfer window and guardrails made of putty on NIL enticements, a coaching exit can proceed a player exodus. Arizona had a quarterback who set a single-season program record by completing 72.4 percent of his passes and a 6-5 wideout who was a third-team Associated Press All-American … and no definitive direction forward. A foundation in danger of total erosion.

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.

On Tuesday, Jan. 16, after alighting from San Jose, addressing his new team and hustling off to do human resources paperwork, Brennan visited with Fifita. (More accurately, Brennan’s wife, Courtney, savvily yanked her husband out of the HR meeting, figuring it might be wise to give the really good quarterback some personal attention.) In that brief conversation, Brennan asked Fifita to bring 25 players – “The leaders, the movers and shakers,” as Brennan puts it now – to his office at 2 p.m. the next day. Brennan set up extra chairs, sat in front of a massive flat-screen television and told the group to fire away. An analog Ask Me Anything. They discussed recruiting philosophy and coaching staff hires and uniform combos and more. It lasted two hours. “Was that cool?” Brennan asked at the end. It was, the group said. So Arizona’s new coach invited them to do it again the next afternoon.

After that second meeting, Brennan says Fifita and McMillan hung back and delivered their verdict: We’re with you, but you can’t tell anyone. The duo wanted to announce it at a men’s basketball home game that Saturday. “I was like, oh, f— yeah, let’s go,” Brennan says. “I was fired up, man.”

There was one last box to check, though.

That same Thursday, Fifita ordered a meal from Panda Express. Orange chicken and white rice. The usual. Yes, he’d decided he would stay at Arizona, but he also was on an unofficial deadline: His father asked him to have that reason why, that unmistakable sign from above, by the end of that day.

Lying in his bed that Thursday, Fifita realized he hadn’t read the message tucked inside his fortune cookie.

You don’t have to travel far to find what you’re looking for, it read.

“That was the first time in that week I was able to sleep,” Fifita says.

Any review of how Arizona kept its two most indispensable players covers the gamut. The new head coach, who wears flip-flops to the office, suits them temperamentally. The offense didn’t change drastically. Fifita and McMillan and others cite their Polynesian culture, too, and the emphasis on family and fealty within it. Even a mass-produced, fast-food snack has an unlikely place in the discussion.

And yet.

“It’s no secret what NIL has become,” fifth-year safety Treydan Stukes says. “It’s not a secret that there is a lot of money to be had, and they were two (highly valued) prospects. We know the type of money that people were waving in front of their face. For them to buckle down and stay here, and turn all that flash and money away to keep this brotherhood together, that inspired us as a team.”

That’s the investment. The payoff is less certain.

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It’s 10:39 a.m. on a Thursday in mid-August, and Tetairoa McMillan drops a pass.

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.”

Some of it is preparation; listed at 5 feet 10, Fifita has to inhale film to compensate for obscured sightlines, so he can throw a pass and just expect someone to be there. Some of it is sheer talent, like McMillan’s ball skills. “Anytime it’s a 50-50 ball, I don’t think I’ve seen one he didn’t get,” says Bobby Wade, Arizona’s new receivers coach and the school’s all-time leader in receiving yards. Most of it, though, is just doing the same thing they’ve done forever.

“They’re like a married couple,” new Arizona offensive coordinator Dino Babers says. “Remember the old scene where Ronald Reagan was talking, and all of a sudden Ronald lost his train of thought, and Nancy jumped in there and said ‘We’re doing all we can?’ They are like that on the football field. (Fifita) scrambles, he moves, and then all of a sudden (McMillan) shows up exactly where he wants him. And he literally catches everything.”

If Arizona is to navigate its first season in the Big 12 Conference and reach the refashioned College Football Playoff, this will be its differentiating dynamic.

Brennan and his staff understood that from day one; while the new offense is a bit of a conceptual marriage, as it would be with any coaching transition, the verbiage is the same Arizona used last season. “Let’s put the onus on the coaches to learn it versus putting it on the players,” Brennan says. “That seemed like an easy decision.” In short, he didn’t want to change a thing about the best thing going in Tucson.

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.”

#Big12FB Offensive Player of the Week: Week 1⃣

Tetairoa McMillan | @ArizonaFBall pic.twitter.com/Xujq0bZH1d

— Big 12 Conference (@Big12Conference) September 2, 2024

Really, the path is not that hard when you can make money simply by scribbling your name on some small pieces of cardboard, or when you can get from one place to another in a luxury automobile, or when there are private jets at your disposal.

But in the transient and transactional culture of college football in 2024, different is an acceptable way to describe how Arizona’s quarterback and star receiver want to get where they want to go.

Leaning forward on his living room couch, Fifita thinks back to last winter. There were 14 power-conference coaching changes, and seven of the primary quarterbacks at those programs ultimately transferred and three others went pro. And Les Fifita had asked his emotionally overloaded son a question – Loyal to whom? – for which Noah Fifita didn’t have a ready answer.

After some ruminating, one came through: to everyone who was still here.

“I’ve been blessed,” Fifita says. “I never missed a meal. I always had a roof over my head. Money was never an issue growing up, because of my parents and my grandparents. With that, I was taught that money can’t bring infinite happiness. Right now, it’s about the people I want to play with. And those people are in Tucson.”

The Athletic’s Bruce Feldman contributed to this report.

(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletic; photos: Christian Petersen, Chris Coduto / Getty Images