If there were anything like justice in college sports, Brendan Sorsby would never play another down of football. It’s a tough thing to say about someone only 22 years old, and under most circumstances, I’d never argue that misdeeds should end an athlete’s career before they hit the professional ranks.
But Sorsby, Texas Tech’s star quarterback, isn’t an average college kid who made a mistake. He bet at least $90,000 on sports — including on games involving the Indiana Hoosiers when he was on that team’s roster as a freshman in 2022. For obvious reasons, the NCAA frowns upon such behavior and rightly issued a permanent ban when it discovered what Sorsby did. Sorsby says he’s been diagnosed with a gambling addiction.
Sorsby says he’s been diagnosed with a gambling addiction.
But on Monday, retired Texas judge Ken Curry, appointed to the case after another judge recused himself, gave Sorsby a pass with a temporary injunction that will allow him to play this season. Curry reasoned that the injunction was necessary to avoid “probable, imminent and irreparable injury” to the quarterback’s college football career. But the judge is mischaracterizing the consequences of Sorsby’s actions as injury.
Those who have watched college football scandals over the decades should be especially incensed by the judge’s ruling that Sorsby should play. His transgressions are exponentially worse than those of Reggie Bush, who was forced to forfeit his Heisman Trophy in 2010 for rules violations he allegedly committed while at the University of Southern California, and exponentially worse than Ohio State University’s Terrelle Pryor, who was suspended for receiving free tattoos and selling his memorabilia. Granted, those punishments were imposed in a bygone era when the NCAA still stood on the farce that players, the labor in its multibillion-dollar enterprise, were amateurs and all but forced them to the black market to profit from their work.
Those infractions from Bush and Pryor were metaphorical misdemeanors relative to the near-treasonous offense Sorsby committed against the NCAA. The integrity of the games, or at least the appearance thereof, are crucial for the association’s survival. Thus, its strict prohibition against gambling and its promise of a kind of death penalty (a lifetime ban) for athletes who gamble anyway.
Sorsby acknowledged a gambling addiction, a serious mental health issue that warrants professional treatment, and to his credit, he reports that he recently sought a 35-day rehab at an inpatient clinic in Arizona. Gambling addiction can cause immense harm to the afflicted and those around them. It’s also a compulsion whose victims often relapse, which isn’t something someone in Sorsby’s position can afford, even once.
It’s not something the NCAA can afford, either. In this instance, the NCAA saw a problem — the starting quarterback at a Power Conference school has a gambling problem that makes him vulnerable to compromise — and it took that problem out at the knees. Sorsby, who is discussed as a rising NFL prospect, had every right to try to enter the league’s supplemental draft or to seek a free agent tryout. Obviously, any NFL general manager with common sense would think long and hard before adding him to the roster, which means he’d be risking not being able to play in college or the pros. But such are the wages of his sin. The predicament he put himself in doesn’t warrant the judge forcing the NCAA to let him play after he flouted its rules and violated the integrity of its sport.
To the extent that he’s seriously contrite, Sorsby deserves credit for taking accountability, which he did in a social media post last month. But contrition doesn’t erase consequences, and accountability often demands them. Yet here we have a judge forcing the NCAA to let Sorsby play alongside other young men who have every right to question their teammate’s motives. Other college programs have responded by vowing not to play any games against Texas Tech.
Sorsby embodies two overlapping problems involving sports and gambling: the increasing prevalence of gambling addiction among young adults, teenagers and even preteens and the seemingly growing number of instances of athletes themselves betting on games. Just last week, an arbitrator ruled that NBA free agent Terry Rozier must forfeit most of his $26.6 million salary for the 2025-26 season after he was alleged to have taken a bribe to withdraw from a game early when he was playing for the Charlotte Hornets. Rozier has pleaded not guilty to the gambling accusations.
If Sorsby ever makes it to the NFL, one wonders how he will fare in a league that prohibits its players from gambling but has rich partnership deals with FanDuel, DraftKings and Caesars Entertainment, its “official casino sponsor.” In the pros, nobody even pretends there’s a wall between the action on the field and the action the sportsbooks are taking in real time. Fans will be in the stadium, not just watching but placing bets. Whichever team signs Sorsby would be gambling too: that he won’t repeat the same offenses that put the NCAA and Texas Tech in a negative spotlight.
Keith Reed
Keith Reed is an award-winning journalist and a past senior editor at ESPN. His work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Root, Vibe, Essence and elsewhere.