Scooter Hobbs column: Finally, a win for the NCAA … and sanity
Published 2:18 pm Friday, June 19, 2026
Well what do you know. Who’d have ever thunk it?
But the NCAA, with the Big 12 evidently doing most of the heavy lifting, finally won one, not for the Gipper perhaps, but for the good of the college game and most of mankind.
It had been a long losing streak, with much seemingly helpless frustration along the way. Get the NCAA near a courtroom lately and it starts walking on eggshells.
But college football can move on now, maybe even with some semblance of rules and regulations.
Texas Tech’s Brendan Sorsby is now the Red Raiders’ ex-quarterback. The NCAA and the Big 12 will have their way and he won’t play this season, having never thrown a pass for the Red Raiders.
Case closed.
Email newsletter signup
In the end, Sorsby and Texas Tech agreed that parting ways was in both’s best interests.
It all stemmed, of course, from the revelation and admission that Sorsby had gambled more than $90,000 on college football, much of it on his own teams, Indiana and Cincinnati, before transferring to Texas Tech.
The Big 12 punished him by banning him from the sport.
Last week Sorsby and Texas Tech found a district judge (in Texas) agreeable enough to say he could play.
That’s the path to getting your way in college athletics these days. Just find a friendly judge. It had become almost too easy.
The legal minds got so over-confident that last week Texas attorney general Ken Paxton went so far as to warn the Big 12 and its members against imposing any sanctions on Texas Tech … or else.
Yet the Big 12, employing what was apparently some world-class legal Xs and Os, won its case without actually entering a courtroom.
According to Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports, the Big 12 legal team’s counterpunch was not to fight the ruling of Sorsby’s eligibility, but rather to ask a federal judge to bar Paxton from preventing the conference from using its bylaws to sanction Texas Tech.
Much brighter legal minds than mine were calling it a master stroke.
“As creative as anything I’ve ever seen,” noted sports attorney Tom Mars told Dellenger.
That move, and continued pressure from other Big 12 schools and beyond, was enough for Tech to decide to forget it and move on. Sorsby will put his name in the upcoming NFL supplemental draft and get on with life.
So, yes, maybe it’s safe to go back to the stadium without getting whacked by a court injunction or a nasty voire dire.
No word yet if any judge plans to force the NFL to open its doors to Sorsby. That’s probably outside any court’s jurisdiction.
But if an NFL team wants to grab him in the league’s supplemental draft, that’s fine. Nobody ever said he deserved a lifetime sentence — or even jail time.
And feel free to wish him well. It’s not like he killed anybody or anything.
That’s one of the curious excuses you kept hearing from the Texas Tech side of the story — the flimsy justifications that made no sense to anybody but Red Raiders.
True, Sorsby, by all accounts, is no threat to decent society. In the real world his crime was a tiny misdemeanor.
But sports organizations for the most part can leave the serious stuff to the court system to sort out. It’s their priority to ensure fair competition for all, keeping their fun and games on the level.
Those come under the heading of conference bylaws more than state and federal laws.
This development doesn’t solve all of college sports’ many problems. Not close.
But if Tech and Sorsby had gotten their way, it would have been just one more instance of the athletes running the asylum, one more obstacle for adults being able to keep order.
If the college games can’t discipline participants for something as damaging (to their sport, if not society) as gambling, how are they supposed to maintain any decorum.
As the Big 12’s court filing said, all the courts have been doing is to “teach all athletes that when you break rules and receive discipline, the solution is not to take responsibility but to find a different umpire.”
Consequences for one’s actions. What a concept, huh?
*
Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics for the American Press. Contact him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com