Nate Robinson: Washington booster offered $100,000 per year
 
Former NBA point guard Nate Robinson said Wednesday that a University of Washington booster offered him $100,000 per year to return to football during his next three years at the school.
 
Speaking on the second episode of his Sports Illustrated podcast "HOLDAT" with fellow NBA product Carlos Boozer, Robinson said he turned down the booster's offer because he wanted to focus on basketball and "don’t want to owe anybody anything."
 
"But for my three years at UW, I had a booster offer me $100,000 a year to come back and play football because they needed Nate Robinson back on the football field," he said. "We wasn't winning no games. It wasn’t exciting. It was crazy, we went through a dark age at the University of Washington when Tyrone Willingham was the coach. We didn’t win not one game it seemed like. It was just crazy."
 
Robinson, who last appeared in an NBA game in 2015, originally joined the Huskies on a football scholarship but decided to switch his focus to basketball after the departure of coach Rick Neuheisel, who was fired the summer after Robinson's freshman year.
 
Robinson said on the podcast that after the offer, he sat down with his mother, who reminded him that $100,000 per year is "a lot of money" and asked him what he wanted to do. He said he declined in part because he was uncertain about the expectations surrounding the payment and wanted to concentrate on basketball.
 
"I don’t want to take money from a booster and not knowing -- like this handshake is what? This is (for us) to keep this money? Because people don’t do nothing for free," Robinson said. "I told my mom I'm going to have to kindly say no thank you, but my dream is to play basketball and earn everything that I got. The grind of putting in the passion and showing how great I can be, because I was never a money guy. I didn’t care. I’ll play for free. I just want to hoop, I don’t care."
 
The Huskies athletic department said in a statement provided to USA TODAY Sports that Robinson's claims had not previously been reported to the school.
 
"Based on his statements it does not appear that any NCAA violations occurred," Washington said in the statement. "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."
 
Late last week, Yahoo! Sports reported that documents obtained as part of an ongoing federal investigation into corruption in college basketball linked more than two dozen high-profile players and more than 20 schools to sports agent Andy Miller and his agency, ASM Sports. The documents include lists of payments that, if accurate, would amount to impermissible benefits under NCAA rules, ranging from free meals to more than $40,000 in loans, according to the report.
 
ESPN reported later in the day that the government intercepted telephone conversations in which Arizona coach Sean Miller discussed making a $100,000 payment for center DeAndre Ayton.
 
Boozer, who was a high-school All-American and heavily touted recruit, said he also fielded various offers during what was supposedly an amateur career, including $1,000 per month, an automatic spot in the starting lineup and, in one case, a free Jeep Cherokee.
 
"And that turned me off because I wasn’t used to getting handouts," Boozer said. "So I told these universities no, I don't want that. And I ended up going to Duke. They didn’t offer me nothing."
 
 
SOURCE:  Schad, Tom.  “Nate Robinson: Washington booster offered $100,000 per year.”  USA TODAY, 28 February 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/pac12/2018/02/28/nate-robinson-washington-booster-offered-100-000-per-year/382035002/.