By admin 
DALLAS – Brendan Sorsby is going to be allowed to play quarterback for Texas Tech this fall (at least as of Monday’s court ruling, which will inevitably lead to another court ruling), and many of my colleagues and about half the sports world believe this to be the death of college football.
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Sorsby is a player who is reported to have placed thousands of bets during his time at Indiana and Cincinnati. One might mention betting is legal in those states (although against NCAA rules) and that when he got to Lubbock, he had others place bets for him in legal gambling states, which is most of them. He has acknowledged placing $90,000 in bets. For those who think that’s a lot, consider it’s over a four-year period. It’s about $2,000 a month. I know people who drop more than that on a golf course on a Saturday afternoon (not me, mind you, I know my game).
The worst thing he did was bet on Indiana or on Indiana player props while he was at school but not on the team. According to ESPN, he bet a total of $850 on the Hoosiers or on props while he was the scout team quarterback. Once he started playing, Sorsby is not accused of having bet on Indiana games or college football at all.
It kills me that some have likened his bets while redshirting as “insider trading.” Do you think a Cowboys practice squad player goes into a game knowing whether the Cowboys are going to win or lose, based on how he saw them practice? You haven’t spent much time around athletes. They have no more insider knowledge than I do after a good practice on the driving range, thinking I might shoot 78 and carding a 92.
Player props, yeah, there’s an issue with that. For me, that’s what the two-game suspension is about. The court didn’t say this, but he should also give back one-sixth of his NIL money for this season as a result of the suspension. That would be fair.
But Sorsby is a long, long way from the Hysier Millers and others in recent years who have been found to place bets AGAINST their team in college basketball. But you probably barely read about them because they aren’t $5 million quarterbacks at Texas Tech.
While I don’t condone Sorsby’s rule-breaking, it’s not something that ever deserved a lifetime ban. Let me explain why lifetime bans regarding gambling exist in sports. There are two reasons. One is the 1919 Chicago White Sox, throwing the World Series to Cincinnati after gamblers (the famed Arnold Rothstein was among them) offered to pay White Sox players to lose. It got Shoeless Joe Jackson banned for life even though he hit .375 in the Series.
The second would be the college basketball betting scandals that caused City College of New York to be stripped of its 1950 NCAA and NIT championships. In the 1950’s, all kinds of college players were betting on games, and it wasn’t entirely new. Your beloved George Gipp at Notre Dame bet on the Irish all the time when he was out on Friday nights, gambling and drinking himself to death before being immortalized on film by Ronald Reagan. Players love action and always have. But it was specifically the throwing of games, taking money from gamblers to try to lose – like the White Sox or CCNY – that prompted sports to adopt lifetime bans in hopes of restoring integrity to their games.
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It is against this backdrop – some guy in a trench coat coming out of the fog on a dark corner – that people envision Sorsby needing to pay up or, worse, bet against his own team and throw a game because he has gone too far. This is not gambling in the 21st century.
You can’t turn on a sporting event without being told who Charles Barkley likes tonight or which golfers’ odds have zoomed to the top of the DraftKings and FanDuel charts. Ten years ago, maybe a little more, gambling was still a dirty little secret (one that everyone knew) that had Al Michaels saying viewers “will be overwhelmed by this last score” to note that the over had just been achieved. Now it’s everywhere, and networks, leagues, college commissioners are all happy to be partners with the legal betting establishment while beating viewers over the heads with constant action at the bottom of the screen known as the crawl.
Those who promote and profit from gambling can’t pretend that the same draconian punishments for placing bets (not talking about bets AGAINST one’s team, of course) can remain in place. You give college players $2 million to $3 million a year to play football or basketball, some of them may just develop a gambling habit. Who is surprised at that? How many commissioners have even looked into studies that show a gambling addiction can be harder to break than smoking or drinking? Yes, they run a little disclaimer at the bottom of the ads for legal reasons, but that’s the end of anyone’s real concerns.
I’m not suggesting anyone feel sorry for Sorsby. He did what he did on his own. He went to gambling rehab, and maybe that worked and maybe it didn’t. But he mostly sounds like someone who was bored with college and had way too much money on his hands although, again, if he really bet only $90,000 over several years, that’s a far cry from a major habit.
As of now, he will be suspended for two games then play for the Red Raiders. Sanctimonious athletic directors have suggested their teams won’t play against Tech. My guess is they will look at their TV contracts and find a way to get their players to Lubbock.
We have seen the death of century-old rivalries, the death of the Pac-12, the endless raiding of mid-major schools of any available talent by the Power Four conferences, coaches having to guard against players being poached during the season, players transferring on a yearly basis with no end in sight, an Ole Miss quarterback using the courts to get a sixth year of eligibility so he can make another approximate $5 million before turning pro, and administrators from the Big 10 seeking a 24-team postseason football tournament. In basketball, we have seen players already drafted by the NBA return to college, multiple players who played pro in Europe return to college, multiple players who played in the NBA’s developmental league return to college.
But a player who never bet on any games in which he had any involvement is the death of college sports?
Got it.
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This story was originally published June 10, 2026 at 2:43 AM.