I’m fascinated by this.
Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby filed a lawsuit against the NCAA in Texas state court on Monday, seeking a temporary injunction that would grant him eligibility for the 2026 college football season. Sorsby is under investigation by the NCAA for gambling violations, including bets he placed on Indiana football while Sorsby was a member of the Hoosiers in 2022, which Sorsby details in an affidavit attached to the lawsuit. Sorsby says he needs clarity on his collegiate status so that he can apply for the NFL’s supplemental draft by late June if his NCAA career is done.
The lawsuit, filed in Lubbock County Court, where Texas Tech University is located, states that Sorsby is “currently ineligible to play for Texas Tech due to prior violations of the NCAA’s sports gambling rules.”
“Rather than support a student-athlete’s recovery from a gambling addiction … the NCAA has weaponized his condition to shore up a facade of competitive integrity, while simultaneously profiting from the very gambling ecosystem it polices,” the lawsuit reads.
Sorsby is represented by prominent sports labor lawyer Jeffrey Kessler and Lubbock lawyer Dustin Burrows. According to updated NCAA sports betting guidelines passed in 2023, players who bet on games involving their own team face permanent loss of eligibility.
In the affidavit, Sorsby admits to “placing small bets on the Indiana football team, typically in amounts between $5 and $50” in 2022 when he was a member of the Hoosiers. Sorsby was a true freshman at the time and competing on the scout team “with several quarterbacks ahead of me on the team’s depth chart and there was no reasonable chance that I would play,” according to the affidavit.
Sorsby said the bets were a way to “feel more connected to the team” and that he never used non-public information when deciding what bets to place.
“Because the Indiana football team was not a very strong competitor in 2022, I lost most of the bets I placed,” according to the affidavit.
He later appeared in one game as a true freshman, but the affidavit states that Sorsby “never placed any bets on any Indiana football game that I participated in or that I reasonably expected that I could have participated in.”
Sorsby, 23, announced on April 27 that he was taking an “immediate indefinite leave of absence” from Texas Tech football to enter a residential treatment program for a gambling addiction. The lawsuit’s timing stands out because of the NCAA investigation timeline. Typically, with eligibility investigations, the school must first determine whether an athlete is ineligible, which the lawsuit claims Texas Tech did “promptly” after the NCAA opened its investigation in April. Once that decision has been made, the school can request reinstatement from the NCAA on behalf of the athlete as part of the NCAA’s Student-Athlete Reinstatement (SAR) process.
The fifth-year senior quarterback is circumventing that timeline in a sense, seeking a court-ordered injunction to have his eligibility reinstated due to concerns over how long it could take the NCAA to deliver that final reinstatement ruling and the timeline of the NFL’s supplemental draft. Sorsby is arguing that if he doesn’t have full clarity on his status for the 2026 season before the supplemental draft deadline and is then unable to play college football this fall, he would lose out on a season’s worth of earning potential at either the college or professional levels. He asks for a hearing no later than June 15, with June 22 the deadline to enter the NFL’s supplemental draft.
That’s “Lubbock lawyer” and also “Texas House Speaker” Dustin Burrows to you, pal. Maybe someone at the Athletic copy desk ought to have caught that. It’s the intersection of gambling and NIL that I find so interesting, and how that led to this lawsuit with high-powered lawyers over what are in some sense relatively small stakes. No one’s seeking to change any rules or have something declared illegal, he just wants to get a bureaucratic decision made in a timely fashion so he doesn’t lose out on potential earnings, either in the NFL or back in college. As for the gambling itself, Sorsby described it as “everything from a Turkish basketball league and Romanian soccer games to obscure doubles tennis matches, the Major League Baseball draft and the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest”, a “compulsion” that wasn’t about trying to make money.
It should go without saying that literally no one could engage in that kind of gambling without the modern apps available to everyone on their phones. Brendan Sorsby’s ennui, or whatever it was that drove him to start betting on Turkish basketball games, would have manifested itself in some other way a decade or so ago. It would be nice if there were some kind of regulatory regime in place to try to minimize the harms of all that, but that’s not the government we have right now. There are some state-level investigations going on as a result of all this, as states still can and do regulate gambling, and that may not end well for Sorsby. His lawsuit is probably a longshot too, but what the heck. It’s easy to point at him for and think he’s a knucklehead, but he was also a teenager, and they are no famous for emotional maturity. He won’t be the only person in this kind of situation, just for now the most prominent one. The next such individual is surely already out there.