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The Brendan Sorsby story is both unfortunate and, given the current landscape of college athletics, not exactly shocking.
The Texas Tech quarterback, one of the highest-paid players in college football, recently entered a facility to treat a gambling addiction. Based on how the NCAA has handled similar cases, he’s likely thrown his last collegiate pass. The NCAA is currently investigating Sorsby’s alleged gambling activity and isn’t likely to restore his eligibility after he reportedly bet on his own team, Indiana, as a freshman in 2022. He allegedly placed thousands of sports bets over recent years, most for small amounts.
Had Sorsby only gambled on professional sports, he’d probably be looking at losing roughly 30% of his 2026 season (three or four games). Betting on college sports is a different matter entirely. Betting on your own team can mean a permanent loss of eligibility. Earlier this month, the NCAA ruled two former Fordham basketball players permanently ineligible for their roles in an alleged point-shaving scheme.
Sorsby is the most high-profile college player caught up in the online gambling trap, but he won’t be the last.
It’s not just a college problem either. Multiple NBA players have been pulled into gambling-related controversies over the last few years; former Atlanta Falcons receiver Calvin Ridley was suspended for a full season after he gambled on NFL games. There was a time you had to physically walk into a Las Vegas casino to legally bet on a game. Now it takes one tap on your phone. Gambling companies pour money into advertising, actively pulling in new customers, and impressionable young athletes with growing bank accounts are an obvious target.
That’s what makes this particularly hard for coaches to manage, and Texas Tech’s Joey McGuire isn’t alone in dealing with it.
“You can’t watch the TV station without an advertisement for gambling,” Georgia coach Kirby Smart said Wednesday. “So the opportunity is there. It’s much more prevalent in this day and age. They also have access to more money to gamble with. There’s a lot of kids that, in my day, would never gamble. They didn’t have money to gamble with. You’ve got to educate your players and you got to hope that they listen and learn. Sometimes it’s an expensive lesson to learn not to do it.”
Smart’s point cuts right to the core of the problem. In the NIL and revenue-sharing era, football and basketball players have access to far more money than they did 25 years ago. That money has genuinely been life-changing for a lot of players; it’s also brought new risks that college programs are still figuring out how to handle.
Former Alabama coach Nick Saban, Smart’s former boss in Tuscaloosa, had been worried about gambling’s potential impact long before Sorsby’s name ever made headlines. Before retiring in 2024, he saw it as one of the most pressing threats facing his program.
“That was always my number one concern because, to me, any time you had something that became legal that was against NCAA rules, it made it a very difficult management and something that was difficult to control,” Saban said. “So we have something that’s not against the law, but it’s against the rules, and that made it tough to manage internally.”
There was actually a recent push to let college athletes of legal gambling age bet on professional sports. An initial proposal allowing staff and players to do exactly that passed, then was recalled and overturned after significant backlash. As it stands today, college athletes are completely prohibited from gambling on any sports.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville has an interesting connection here. He’s the former coach of two of the three schools (Cincinnati and Texas Tech) tied to Sorsby’s situation. Before entering politics, Tuberville said he always gave his players three rules: don’t talk to agents, don’t sign with agents, and stay away from gamblers asking about injuries. Players can have agents now, but the gambling piece has only gotten more complicated.
“You got this kid that’s come from Cincinnati, went to Texas Tech, got a problem and a lot of it’s created by online things,” Tuberville said. “It’s just unfortunate that this has happened. It’s gonna be a lesson to learn hopefully for a lot of players.”
If the NCAA rules Sorsby ineligible, his most realistic remaining option would be the NFL supplemental draft. But according to CBS Sports NFL insider Jonathan Jones, that path looks like a dead end too.
“If he wanted to apply to the NFL for the supplemental draft, folks I talked to believe he would not be approved,” Jones said. “So the supplemental draft seems like an extremely unlikely pathway this summer. And here’s why: The NFL is obviously very hard on those who gamble on NFL games … If you are in the NFL and you do bet on your team — win or lose — you are banned a minimum of two years. That’s how seriously the league takes this.”
Before this investigation became public, Sorsby was widely considered a potential first-round draft pick heading into next year’s draft. Now, his entire football future is in serious doubt.
