There's good high school football, and then there's powerhouse high school football in Texas. That said, there are good quarterbacks, and there are those who might consider skipping their senior seasons of prep ball to start making money already in Texas.
Quinn Ewers was the starting quarterback for the Southlake Carroll Dragons last season, taking the school back to the championship game, where they lost to Austin Westlake.
Ewers is supposed to return in the 2021 season, but there's a chance he could forego his senior season to start making money on his name, image and likeness (NIL), which was recently approved by the NCAA. Texas high school rules don't allow athletes to make money, so Ewers might skip his last year of high school ball to make money for, well, college ball at Ohio State University, where he can make even more money.
Why can't he do it now? The Texas governing body over public school athletics, the University Interscholastic League (UIL), does not allow athletes to be paid.
Ewers told Yahoo Sports he could just leave the Dallas-area suburb of Southlake and train in Ohio the next year to get ready for the 2022 season and beyond, all while raking in the cash.
"I don't really know, I don't have a final decision made quite yet," Ewers said. "I'm leaning toward leaving and going up to Ohio, just so I don't have to deal with UIL stuff and can get comfortable with Ohio and Columbus and start to learn."
Although there are state high school laws (UIL) that prohibit prep athletes from competing if they make money off their likeness, the new NCAA ruling is quite gray when it comes to that, which triggers the Ewers family.
"We provided the UIL with quite a bit of information relative to all of our deals, the specifics of the deals, which were more important to us, which were less," Ewers' father, Curtis, told Yahoo. "We felt like based on our requests they could look at the deals and at least pick one or two they could give and one or two they could take."
Quinn Ewers and his Dragons were a state runner-up last season after running the table, including a win over nationally-ranked Duncanville in the state semifinal of Texas' largest classification (6A Div. I). Southlake Carroll, which is coached by former Dragon and college QB Riley Dodge, is expected to make another run to state this season. That's with Ewers at the helm, of course.
Southlake is a very affluent sector of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, just as Westlake is in Austin.
So who could Carroll potentially meet in Arlington for the state championship again? How about Dodge's father, Todd Dodge, the former Carroll [and University of North Texas] coach who has quarterback Cade Klubnik, a Clemson commit.
Uncommon Knowledge
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