Slam dunk champ Nate Robinson says a Washington booster offered him $100,000 to keep playing football

Eleven-year NBA veteran Nate Robinson also played college football at one point. He appeared in 13 games for Washington as a freshman in 2002, recording a pair of interceptions and starting six games, and then gave up football to focus on hoops.

He now says that decision involved turning down six figures from a Huskies booster who wanted him to stick with football. Via his SI podcast:

When they fired [football head coach] Rick Neuheisel my freshman year that made it easy for me to make my decision to quit and go play basketball, which I wanted to do anyway. For my three years at UW, I had a booster offer me $100,000 per year to come back and play football because they needed Nate Robinson back on the football field because we weren’t winning any games, it wasn’t exciting.

But a booster came to me, my mom sat down and my mom was like, ‘That’s a lot of money.’ And she was looking at me like, ‘What you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘I want to hoop, I don’t want to take money from a booster and not knowing if this handshake is for us to keep this money, because people don’t do nothing for free.’ And that’s what my mom taught me. What do I owe you after this? My mom was just like, ‘What do you want to do? It’s up you. This is your life, not mine.’ I told my mom I going to have to kindly say ‘no thank you, but my dream is to play basketball and earn everything that I got.’

That would’ve been an especially handsome sum for just about any college athlete, based on the going rates being discovered by the FBI in hoops. An agent allegedly offered $73,500 to eventual Dallas Mavericks point guard Dennis Smith, and Arizona’s been accused (perhaps dubiously) of overseeing a $100,000 payment to five-star center Deandre Ayton. Adjusted for inflation, that offer claimed by Robinson would’ve amounted to about $140,000 in 2018 dollars.

You’d have to really want to hang on to a DB to throw around that kind of money, based on observable amounts in the bizarre market created by NCAA rules.

“Absolutely not,’’ Neuheisel said when asked by the Seattle Times about knowledge of such an offer. “It would be shocking. I don’t know any way you would know it.’’

And UW’s response, in a statement:

The events described by Nate Robinson had not been reported to our department in any way, and were new information to us this morning. Based on his statements it does not appear that any NCAA violations occurred, but we look forward to following up with Nate and any other relevant parties to learn more about this matter in hopes of continuing to foster a full environment of compliance within all of our athletic programs.

Regardless, Robinson was All-Pac-10 in hoops a year later and pretty clearly chose the right sport.