Track or football? With his eligibility exhausted, UNM's Cam Watts mulls decision

If Cam Watts doesn’t directly say he’s approaching a crossroads, you can see it in his dress. On a Tuesday morning in late May, he walks into a conference room at New Mexico’s Colleen J. Maloof Administration Building wearing a cutoff t-shirt with an NFL logo on it — and a pair of Asics running shoes.

This summer will determine whether one or the other becomes part of his permanent outfit.

Because after this spring, Watts has a decision to make: pursue track as a professional — following a season in which he broke a school record and won a pair of conference titles, all after joining the team in February — or move to football, where his blazing 4.31 40-yard dash at UNM’s Pro Day caught the attention of NFL scouts, opening the door to a roster spot in the most exclusive leagues in the world?

If it isn’t a no-brainer decision, it’s certainly a uniquely enviable one.

“I have these talks with my mom and my dad and my friends,” the Tulsa, Oklahoma native said last week. “The days where I don’t feel like getting up and going to go train, or days where I don’t feel like going to school or doing work, I’ll just be like, ‘somebody would love to be in my shoes. They would love to have this opportunity.’ It’d be crazy for me to take it for granted.”

Even crazier? How quickly it all happened. After transferring to UNM from Texas Tech last summer, Watts played in nine games and made 20 total tackles as a reserve corner — a solid, if not outstanding, season, but one he can build on for next year.

Then his world was turned upside down. Watts’ waiver for what would have been his final year of eligibility was denied, leaving him with a question all athletes face at some point: what now?

Darren Gauson thought he had an answer. UNM’s head track and field coach reached out to gauge if he had any interest in joining the team for a season. After a couple meetings, Watts was interested enough to reach out to UNM sprints coach Kyra Mohns in February and inquire about coming on.

“I was like, ‘OK, wait a second, I’ve never seen you run’,” Mohns said last week. “‘You need to have some sort of tryout first.’”

Watts ended up making the cut by winning the 60-meter dash at an open meet that month, running it in 6.8 seconds — even after pulling his hamstring and slowing up at the end. Then he made his official UNM debut at the Mountain West Indoor Track & Field Championships just a few weeks later, where he won the league title for the 60 in 6.64 seconds.

In the outdoor season, Watts broke Deejay Lane’s 13-year-old UNM record in the 100 by over a quarter of a second with a converted 10.05 in April. Less than a month later, he claimed an outdoor Mountain West title in the 100 (10.23) before falling short of qualifying for the NCAA Championships.

NOTE: Due to his outdoor times, Watts is qualified to run in the USATF Outdoor Championships this summer.

And now, a decision.

The case for track: If this season was close to Watts’ floor, what could be his ceiling? Though she only worked with him for a couple months, Mohns has seen enough to know Watts could make some noise if he chooses to run at the USATFs in late July.

“If he does stick with track, he’ll run 9.8 (in the 100) like, in the next year,” she said, citing a time that’s among the upper echelon in NCAA. “If he continues to stick with it, his potential is limitless. There’s so much there.”

The case for football: Nobody turns down the NFL if the interest is there. Since Watts clocked his 4.31 40 — a time that would’ve ranked fourth at this year’s NFL Combine — in front of scouts at UNM’s Pro Day in March, he’s received mini-camp invites from the Kansas City Chiefs, New Orleans Saints and Indianapolis Colts, mostly repping as a defensive back.

“(It’s a) childhood dream and I’m able to live that out,” he said.

Watts could also pursue football in a different sense. An offer to serve as a graduate assistant at UNM is “still on the table,” he said, and would give him an opportunity to finish his second post-graduate degree.

An enviable position, but far from an easy decision.

“(I’m) just (taking) it one day at a time, and just seeing where my next path is,” Watts said. “Seeing what I want to do with my life.”