Man oh man. Here we go. I am an attorney. I spent entire semesters and even years taking classes, of which I’ve completely forgotten at this point. I took an entire year of Constitutional Law and the Equal Protection Clause is an absolute beast. It’s why I haven’t been too opinionated on the matter other than the idea that betting on your own team seems pretty bad and I was not giving up any hopes that he’d be eligible. That’s a pretty simplistic viewpoint, but I’m a pretty simplistic guy.

When someone does their own research, it usually ends up being an incomplete understanding of the law. And I’m still in this position right now given that Brendan Sorsby’s temporary injunction was granted by the 99th District Court of Lubbock. And yes, as you all already know, this was not a Texas Tech former student, that judge recused himself and the judge who made the ruling went to UT-Arlington with a law degree at Houston and lives in Tarrant County.

I’d love to read the actual ruling and not a summary of the ruling.

The complicating factor in all of this is the lack of teeth by the NCAA and if you are asking me (which no one is, but I am here and so are you) the problem is that the NCAA is looking for solutions. They were a dynasty for what seemed like forever, but now they realize that they simply cannot control the situation any longer. It’s why they think they need for for Congress to act and create an antitrust exemption which would then permit the NCAA to control NIL and penalties for players and they would essentially be back to being the judge and jury on these matters. Generally speaking, the NCAA has lost case after case since O’Bannon.

And we all know that Cody Campbell is attempting to introduce legislation that would prohibit super leagues and grant that antitrust exemption in limited form.

The problem isn’t Texas Tech. Or that Cody Campbell is a billionaire. Or that Texas Tech supported Brendan Sorsby.

To be clear, the temporary injunction ruling had nothing to do with Texas Tech, it had everything to do with Sorsby and the NCAA. In fact, the legislation that Campbell is supporting actually would grant the NCAA the teeth to suspend Sorsby. But those rules aren’t in place.

And don’t forget that the other shoe to drop is that at some point there will be a reckoning on whether or not students are employees, which Campbell’s bill prohibits collective bargaining, which in a perfectly normal world, taking away the rights of student athletes without representation.

That’s a bigger issue and the refrain currently is that Texas Tech is the villain because of the judge’s decision and of course this doesn’t make sense to me. I saw where Stewart Mandel wrote that Texas Tech should not support Sorsby. Of course the only support has been that they support him through his addiction, but then opposing coaches would have spun it as a program that doesn’t support it’s players. Texas Tech has largely been on the sideline in this case with Sorsby and the NCAA and now the call is for Texas Tech to simply cut Sorsby for the ruling granting Sorsby’s eligibility. Georgia and Nebraska are saying that they shouldn’t schedule Texas Tech and the flinging on Texas Tech’s side is that well, look at all of these programs that supported rapists or players who have broken the law in other capacities. Or Michigan literally cheated in order to win games. Or we still don’t know what Indiana and Cincinnati knew and when and why people aren’t asking questions about them as well.

Playing the “What about” game is never-ending and there’s no right answer.

For me, I don’t enjoy being the villain. It’s not a costume that I want to wear and I get all what that means. Me saying that I’d prefer to just write about sports isn’t going to make all of this go away. I’m also willing to be patient and see how things play out.