Yahoo Sports Houston Texans QB Deshaun Watson '50-50' on the idea to pay college players
Houston Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson doesn’t vehemently disagree with his former Clemson coach about the idea of paying college football players.
Clemson’s Dabo Swinney has been one of the more outspoken coaches against paying players as more people are open to the idea that college athletes should get paid.
Watson told Yahoo Sports he was “50-50” when it came to paying players.
“I’m like 50-50, I guess. I see where a lot of people come from when they don’t want to pay the players,” he said in the video above before noting that a star quarterback on a team gets a lot more attention than an offensive lineman.
All college football teammates get the same cost-of-attendance stipends, and book and housing stipends.
In a May interview with ESPN in the afterglow of his 10-year, $93 million contract extension, Swinney mentioned how professionalizing college football would turn him off from it.
"Who knows what's going to happen down the road? I have no idea," Swinney said. "I just try to be great where my feet are. That's my focus every day. Who knows? They may do away with college football in three years. There may be no college football. They may want to professionalize college athletics. Well, then, maybe I'll go to the pros. If I'm going to coach pro football, I might as well do that.”
It wasn’t the first time Swinney — the man with the richest college football coaching contract ever — had used the term “professionalize” when it comes to paying college football players.
Watson, the quarterback on Clemson’s 2016 national championship team, said he wasn’t worried about the money when he was in school.
“It just depends,” he said. “I was fine whenever I was in school I was good. I didn’t really care about the money.”
– – – – – – –
Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports.
More from Yahoo Sports:
