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Texas Tech Football: Continuing to Update the Brendan Sorsby Situation
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Texas Tech Football: Continuing to Update the Brendan Sorsby Situation

Football
Seth C

Texas Tech Football: Continuing to Update the Brendan Sorsby Situation

Youssouf had 7-on-7 football at SMU with his high school team on Tuesday night. In fact, he had a rep against Cooper Witten, yes, the son of Jason Witten, and Cooper is committed to Oklahoma. Cooper knocked one of Yo’s hands away to result in an incomplete pass, but it was still pretty cool. To make a long story short, Yo ended up geeing dehydrated, full body cramps (the debilitating kind of cramps that where every muscle is screaming) and ended up having to call an ambulance to take him to Children’s Hospital where they determined that he had rhabdomyolysis. They kept him for the night and I stayed with him. We didn’t get home until 2 or so yesterday afternoon. Yo is all better, but it was not fun for a bit. Thanks for your patience and all of your good thoughts.

Since it is difficult to follow everything, I’ll just hit the highlights. On Tuesday, Texas Tech Athletic Director Kirby Hocutt released a statement on Brendan Sorsby:

Let me be direct about what Texas Tech’s position actually is: we are glad Brendan is still part of our community, because that is where we can extend him the best possible support in his ongoing recovery. Clinical care, device monitoring, financial oversight, outpatient therapy . That infrastructure exists because we take our responsibility to this young man seriously. We spent Monday after the judge’s ruling getting those systems stood up for him, not thinking about X’s and O’s. Pulling him out of a structured environment, away from his team and his support system, does not protect anyone. It might be a cleaner headline, but it wouldn’t be the right one. And it wouldn’t be true to the institutional values that guide us every day.

To my colleagues: I understand the frustration. This situation is hard, it is new, and there is no perfect answer. The system we’re operating within is binary, but the situation is not. We are open to ongoing conversations about how to best handle these issues as an industry going forward. We will continue to be transparent in our decision-making. Most importantly, we will keep doing what we have always done, put our students first.

Lubbock Avalanche-Journal’s Don Williams summarized head coach Joey McGuire’s first public thoughts on the Sorsby Situation:

“Brendan Sorsby is recovering from an addiction. He’s recovering,” McGuire said in a video posted on X by Chris Gordy of SportsTalk 790 Houston. “I’ve sat down with this young man multiple times, and the things that he is going through and what he’s been through is serious, and I have a number of people in my family that were addicted to different stuff and so I’ve seen what addiction does to people.

“And so us even saying to the point before we get to the legal part that he can be ready week 3 against Houston is still a stretch, because guess what: He’s still recovering. You don’t necessarily know between now and then exactly, ‘Do I see a different person?’ I know it sounds crazy, but I do. Do I see a kid that feels like he’s got a thousand pounds of weight lifted off of him? He’s made the statement that he feels like this is a moment that can actually change his life.”

And now a couple of tweets.

Host Robert Giovanetti, Athletic Director Kirby Hocutt, head coach Joey McGuire, President Lawrence Schovanec, and Senior Associate Athletic Director / Student-Athlete Health and Wellness Grant Stovall.

ESPN’s Dan Wetzel writes that Texas Tech is not to blame for a judge’s ruling:

Was the apparently haughty Big Ten doing what was best for college athletics when it repeatedly raided other conferences in realignment the past 15 years, effectively killing off Big East football and the venerable, 108-year-old Pac-12?

Or was that just the league justifying the carnage, dead rivalries and competitive imbalance left behind because, hey, that’s business and it needed a few more bucks?

As much as everyone except one clueless judge down in Texas understands that the integrity of sport should be protected at all costs, conference realignment caused far more harm to college athletics writ large than whether Brendan Sorsby once bet on his 4-8 Hoosiers team.

The wild threats and embarrassing dramatics are pointless. No, the Big 12 isn’t going to throw Texas Tech out over this; that would be financially prohibitive if even legally possible.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following was written on Monday night to post on Tuesday. The technical difficulties and then night away at the ER precluded me posting this.

I’ve been summarizing the news for decades and on days like yesterday and the day before, it’s really difficult to summarize everything that’s happened. I decided to zig rather than zag. And tomorrow morning I’m likely going to have just an open thread, I’ve got 7-on-7 football tonight and need to leave early for work tomorrow so whatever I post tomorrow will be abbreviated at best.

Do you want to read a contrarian point of view? Dallas Morning News’ Tim Cowlishaw (the archive link) does not hold back:

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.

Via Awful Announcing, you’re not going to believe this, but Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon thinks that they are all being santimonious about the entire situation:

“I don’t understand why schools don’t want to play against Sorsby,” said Kornheiser. “When he comes back from this silly 2-game suspension where he misses a game against Abilene Christian and a game against Oregon State, they don’t want to play against him because he’s good. Texas Tech’s paying him $6 million this year because he’s good. Get off this moral high horse. Every other school in that conference and in the SEC and in the Big Ten would look at taking a guy like Sorsby because he’s a very good quarterback. I mean, I think we all have to appreciate that. Texas Tech went through legal motions here. They did what you’re supposed to do. They did what a school in the Big Ten or the SEC would do.”

Red Raider Sports’ Joey Yeager cannot believe the hypocracy:

Frankly, it is nauseating to listen to these pharisaical imbeciles rabbit on about how the Sorsby ruling is a Nuremberg-worthy atrocity, and how the evil-doers at Texas Tech make the Assyrians, Aztecs and Bolsheviks look like Mother Teresa and the Good Samaritans. And it’s not because they are wrong to condemn the ruling. At almost every level of morality, the ruling is impossible to defend. But what makes the behavior of these privileged popinjays so revolting is the notion that, were the roles reversed, they wouldn’t have done precisely what Texas Tech did and then wag their fingers (Bill Clinton-style) at anybody daring to question their moral integrity. Does anybody seriously think any SEC or Big Ten school would drop a player who could make the difference between a national title and missing the playoffs just because he bet on college football? Hah. These vermin would sell their mothers to Satan for a natty, and I’m not joking.

College football, in other words, ain’t what it use to be. It’s a massive and hugely lucrative industry not unlike the NFL. It’s mercenary, it’s win-at-all-cost, and it’s about very rich people drooling, pawing and grasping to become even richer. The notion that there’s any sort of moral compass governing this sport is utterly laughable, and it’s an insult to anybody with 20 axons and dendrites to rub together to claim otherwise. It is impossible to be too cynical about college sports, and cynicism, by the way, is just a form of contempt. But here the college sports elites are, greedily lapping up every drop of ambrosia they can lay a tongue to–ethics be damned–and then abominating Texas Tech for doing exactly what they’d be doing in Texas Tech’s situation.

I don’t know that the TCU AD actually communicated that Sorsby shouldn’t play, but he didn’t seem bothered. Part I:


Part II:

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