The Big 12 Conference did what the Lubbock District Court would not and the NCAA could not. It closed ranks, exerted pressure and helped persuade Texas Tech and Brendan Sorsby that there is no longer a place for the quarterback in college football. This was a master class in taking care of your own neighborhood.
Maybe it’s even a blueprint for other conferences in handling members who try to skirt NCAA rules by running to court.
Monday night, after a week of mounting outrage over Sorsby’s dubiously gained temporary injunction to play for the Red Raiders in 2026, he decided to move on to the NFL supplemental draft. It’s the right move for college athletics, even if it now tosses the hot potato into the hands of Roger Goodell & Co. The NFL is hardly a league full of choir boys, but welcoming in someone who compulsively gambled on his own sport and own team is not to be taken lightly.
Hopefully Sorsby has a full recovery from gambling addiction. Playing for Texas Tech in the fall didn’t need to be part of it, and might actually have run counter to it.
Thus an embarrassing chapter in the sport ends without turning the Big 12 season into a sideshow. Kudos to commissioner Brett Yormark and the campus leadership of 15 schools that refused to go along with the scam. They backed up their outrage with a mix of conviction and pragmatism—not backing down in the face of threatened lawsuits, but also not overreacting with a bad plan for retribution.
A series of league meetings last week made clear that the Big 12 was intent on applying sanctions to Texas Tech if it played Sorsby. That stance never wavered as Texas attorney general Ken Paxton and Sorsby’s lawyer, Jeffrey Kessler, threatened legal action. It never wavered as Tech put out a marathon PR video that tried too hard and still said too little. It never wavered in confronting the billionaire booster who is disrupting college sports, Cody Campbell.
It helped when other attorneys general, from the states of Oklahoma and Kansas, came out in support of the Big 12. But the bigger statement came from the league itself, which filed a fierce and detailed complaint against Texas Tech and Paxton in federal court Monday morning in advance of an executive board meeting. That was a powerful punch that changed the terms of engagement.
“The Big 12 has removed any doubt that they aren’t playing around,” prominent attorney Tom Mars told Sportico on Monday. “Now that Texas Tech realizes this isn’t some junior high school disagreement and that they’re in federal court, it will be interesting to see how much hubris and swag they still have.”
The answer: not much. When enough people stand up to the loudest guy in the bar while he is flexing his muscles, a confrontation can end before anyone gets hurt.
Give the Big 12 membership credit for doing what seems increasingly rare in college sports—looking out for their collective best interests. This is a league that survived the SEC poaching Texas and Oklahoma because everyone else stuck together, realizing that its strength came as a group and not individually. Similar teamwork was in play here, with a unified stance in favor of what was right.
And also give credit to Yormark, who came into the job in 2022 as a brash, outsider businessman and now looks like a strong, smart leader who understands his constituency. He’s had a few gimmicky ideas, some of which were better than others, but his handling of this hot-button issue shows his substance.
It isn’t easy to load up resistance against the defending league champion and overwhelming league favorite if Sorsby had stayed at Tech. The Red Raiders were becoming what the Big 12 had hungered for: a flagship power that could compete nationally, rising above the league’s sprawling middle class. But the case against Sorsby was so clear that even after a crackpot ruling let him out of NCAA jail, the Big 12 wasn’t going to roll over for its top football program.
Does this set a new precedent for conference activism? That’s to be determined, but it’s a bold step. As one program after another has gone to court in hopes of finding a compliant judge who will make a convenient eligibility ruling that handcuffs the NCAA, that program’s conference peers have passively fumed. Some complaints might have been heard, but often anonymously and rarely leading to significant conference action.
Occasionally, league offices have stepped up to file an affidavit against the eligibility of one of their own—the Southeastern Conference did so in the case of Alabama basketball center Charles Bediako and the Atlantic Coast Conference did it in the case of Virginia quarterback Chandler Morris. In this instance, appalled by the most glaring circumvention of NCAA rules in memory, the Big 12 went all in against a member school and got the right result.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether the final decision was Sorsby’s or Tech’s—it only matters that it was the right one for college sports. Is Texas Tech humbled, chastened, embarrassed at all by trying to defend the indefensible? Maybe not. The Red Raiders seemed to enjoy wearing black hats and clown suits for a few weeks as this fiasco played out.
Truth be told, this does not end Tech’s bid at a repeat Big 12 title. The rest of the roster is quite strong, and presumptive backup quarterback Will Hammond is expected to be ready sometime early in the season after injuring an ACL last October. If the Red Raiders have an offensive coaching staff commensurate with their big-budget player payroll, they have a chance to overcome the loss of Sorsby—who never threw a pass for the team after transferring in from Cincinnati during the winter.
At the very least, the rest of the country doesn’t have to curl its lip in disgust while watching Texas Tech play this fall with Sorsby at quarterback. His football life doesn’t have to be over, but his college career needed to end.
More College Football From Sports Illustrated
Listen to SI’s college sports podcast, Others Receiving Votes, below or on Apple and Spotify. Watch the show on SI’s College YouTube channel.
Add us as a preferred source on Google
