Well, that embarrassing 21-minute conference-room chat sure ended up being a big waste of everybody's time. Brendan Sorsby, the Texas Tech quarterback who admitted to placing over 9,000 bets on college and professional sports—including at lest 40 bets involving Indiana football while he was on the team—has decided to give up his fight to remain a college football player. He will now attempt to enter the NFL via the supplemental draft.
The NCAA declared Sorsby ineligible to play soon after his betting activity was discovered, but the quarterback won a preliminary injunction against the NCAA in a Texas court on June 8, which restored his eligibility and opened the door for him to play in the upcoming season, before any appeal from the NCAA would have time to be ruled on. What followed was an embarrassing week where Texas Tech, happy to have a transfer quarterback they paid $6 million for back in the fold, went on an extended PR campaign to make the case that letting a compulsive gambler who had already made bets involving his own team back into their program was actually the right thing to do.
Texas Tech's yapping only seemed to antagonize the rest of the Big 12, and so on Monday the conference, ignoring a stupid and stern warning from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, filed for a federal injunction to restore its right to suspend Sorsby under conference rules. At the same time, the NCAA asked the appeals court to expedite its appeal of the June 8 ruling. All of this suddenly became too much of a headache for Sorsby and Texas Tech, and on Monday the university's board of regents released a statement announcing that Sorsby will be leaving the football program and setting his sights on the NFL.
What happens next largely depends on whether there is an NFL team out there willing to debase itself as much as Texas Tech did in order to employ a quarterback who led Cincinnati to a 7-6 record last season. So, yeah, he'll be a Brown or a Jet.
