After a week of chaos and borderline revolt in college football, the Brendan Sorsby story ended sensibly and abruptly Monday night, with Sorsby declaring for the supplemental draft.
Sorsby made the decision just one week after a Texas judge shocked the sporting landscape by granting Sorsby a temporary injunction that blocked the NCAA from enforcing its career suspension of Sorsby, who had admitted to placing more than 40 bets on Indiana when he was a freshman quarterback with the Hoosiers in 2022.
That decision by a retired judge from Tarrant County, Texas, caused an eruption in college football.
Big 12 opponents seethed. Big Ten and SEC foes ordered their programs to strip Texas Tech from the schedule. In recent days the outrage snowballed. Big 12 presidents and athletic directors actively met with one clear consensus from the rest of the league: Sorsby shouldn’t be allowed to play. It went so far that state attorney generals from Oklahoma, Kansas and Utah voiced their support for the Big 12 in the face of Texas attorney general Ken Paxton threatening the conference with legal action if it attempted to interfere with the judge’s order.
College football is basically religion in Texas, and the strife surrounding the Sorsby situation felt, in a way, biblical.
Sorsby, who entered a gambling rehabilitation program and stood to be suspended the first two games of Texas Tech’s season, was never a martyr, and the national blowback from his high-profile lawsuit against the NCAA cannot have been worth it. He was easily going to be the most unpopular figure in college football this season, and that harassment would have been a terrible, season-long drain on his mental health. We’ll see if a possible NFL suspension looms and what even happens in the supplemental draft, but there will be more peace afforded to Sorsby if only because this Texas Tech saga is over.
Now to talk about Texas Tech. Its most vociferous Sorsby defenders of the last week have Sorsby himself to thank for saving the Red Raiders from themselves.
The Red Raiders, in just a few short months, had gone from one of the great underdog success stories of the NIL era of college athletics into a villain. Their power triumvirate of booster, coach and AD had been unflinching about playing Sorsby this fall despite the fact their prized transfer QB had crossed one of the last few lines in sports: He had bet on games involving his team.
Preventing that is foundational to the integrity of the sport. Any crack in the competitive, unpredictable nature of college football could endanger the enterprise’s existence. It’s the rare rule everyone in college football can agree on.
Yet Texas Tech dug its spurs into the West Texas dirt in protest.
Not only would it support Sorsby through his gambling addiction — the right thing to do — but Tech showed up to this fight fully loaded. It supported Sorsby’s lawsuit, appealed the NCAA’s career-long suspension and then doubled down when critics blasted the judge’s outlandish decision to reduce Sorsby’s punishment to just two games.
Texas Tech paid Sorsby more than $5 million this offseason to transfer from Cincinnati. He was the building block for a championship push. The Red Raiders, led by the bombastic booster Cody Campbell, had made their big investment and were totally willing to push through the vitriol to win as many games as possible this fall, perhaps even all of them (Texas Tech is loaded).
Texas Tech’s administration explained publicly that they didn’t want to abandon Sorsby in a time of need. He needed support from the school and his team to work through his addiction. Fair and frankly noble of Texas Tech.
But the one thing the Red Raiders never managed to explain is why they couldn’t help Sorsby and also keep him on the bench.
He didn’t have to play. Texas Tech could have helped Sorsby through a difficult time and also justly punished him for the the type of violation that will forever keep baseball’s hit king out of the Hall of Fame.
Instead, whether it was via a 20-minute video, Campbell’s tweets or head coach Joey McGuire’s stump speeches at booster events, the Red Raiders kept fighting against the obvious correct answer.
It’s possible Tech’s stance has softened in recent days. Many around the sport speculated it eventually would: Could they really have stood up against the waves for 75 more days? The Big 12 hoped to come down hard on Texas Tech, and public vitriol against Tech outside of Lubbock blazed. The Red Raiders were likely going to have to back down eventually, and perhaps they pushed Sorsby toward the NFL path with the supplemental draft deadline looming.
Either way, Sorsby leaving for the NFL is best for all parties. Sorsby gets to move on with his career. The NCAA and college football stave off a doomsday scenario.
Texas Tech, for its part, avoids losing a part of its soul.
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