LAS VEGAS — Anyone who believed this isn’t the Wild Wild West era of college sports must have been flummoxed by Texas Tech’s recent theatrics.
In recent years, quarterback Brendan Sorsby made $90,000 worth of bets while at Indiana and Cincinnati.
In January, he transferred to the Red Raiders’ program, in Lubbock, Texas, where super-booster Cody Campbell dangled a $5 million lure.
On April 27, Sorsby checked into rehab to treat a sports-gambling addiction. The NCAA ruled him ineligible. A reinstatement request fizzled.
All de rigueur, per NCAA betting rules that, for example, ended the collegiate careers of Iowa State quarterback Hunter Dekkers and Iowa defensive lineman Noah Shannon (for making a $10 wager).
However, the Sorsby roller-coaster was just gaining steam.
I’ve long trumpeted “Hud” and “The Last Picture Show” as the finest Lone Star State films, but this Lubbock lunacy might require the borrowing of “Giant” from Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson.
Who wields the most West Texas influence and power, among billionaire Campbell, the former Tech lineman and Tech’s Board of Regents chair, lawyers on either side and a retired county judge?
I tapped former UNLV quarterbacks Steve Stallworth and Jon Denton, and Ohio judge Kevin Braig to make sense of this mess.
“I’m a rules follower, so I don’t like how this has played out,” Stallworth said. “Some blame the system, some blame the schools,” Denton said. “But it’s on Sorsby.”
Sorsby might have competed for the Heisman Trophy this season.
“But the only award he will win,” Braig said, “is the [Art] Schlichter Trophy.”
Flames fanned
Perhaps a version of the 1964 political thriller “Seven Days in May,” in which Kirk Douglas, a colonel, keeps rogue Air Force general Burt Lancaster from taking over the country, best tells this story.
Eight Days in June.
Sorsby provoked an already-turbulent NCAA environment in which players get millions of dollars. Guidelines? Invisible. What earned SMU football the death penalty in 1987 would be lauded today.
The former UNLV signal-callers are in a keen position to pass judgment.
Long before legal sports betting blanketed this country, via a US Supreme Court ruling in May 2018, a single-game wager could only be made in Nevada.
As a caveat, betting on UNLV and Nevada games was verboten. That 40-plus-year hypocrisy ended in 2001, when politicos realized a Rebels bet didn’t differ from one on USC or Notre Dame.
After backing up Randall Cunningham, Stallworth choreographed a home upset over Wisconsin in 1986. In 1996 and ’97, Denton threw for 6,177 yards and 43 touchdowns.
“This will open a whole can of worms in college athletics,” Stallworth said. “Kids now will bet on their own team, go to rehab, claim mental distress and anxiety, and get away with it.
“The NCAA has no juice anymore. Courts have taken all of that away.”
School officials have long lectured UNLV teams about the perils and penalties of sports betting.
“We knew the ramifications,” Denton said.
He also knows betting will continue.
“Ease of access today,” Denton said. “You’ll always have a rogue player or two.”
His major Sorsby concern?
“Betting on your own team, especially while playing in games, takes big cojones, no matter the amount,” Denton said. “Plus, he used other people to place bets, showing he was doing it to circumvent the rules.
“Played with fire.”
Doomed
Monday, the Big 12 Conference, through powerhouse law firm Sidley Austin, filed a 47-page federal-court lawsuit against every Texas Tech executive and the state’s attorney general.
Shifting the case out of the county into federal jurisdiction, to Braig, represented a maestro maneuver. Sorsby ended his charade, applying to enter this summer’s NFL supplemental draft.
A judge of the Logan County Court of Common Pleas in Ohio, Braig is a vital source. In his sharp monthly sports newsletter, he calls college football SPF, or Saturday Pro Football.
In answering my inquiries, he called the Sorsby case “high schoolish,” reminiscent of LeBron James’s legal measures to retain prep eligibility.
That county judge Ken Curry set a trial date after the 2027 College Football Playoff title game perplexed Braig.
“He passively-aggressively transformed his order from a mere preservation of the status quo into a de facto decision on the merits,” Braig wrote me. “That is not how you do it. He’s a retired visiting judge. He [can] try the case . . . in a timely manner. The facts were not in dispute.”
Braig viewed Sorsby as just another mercenary. It could have been far different.
More than 20 years ago, Braig said publicly if he ran the NCAA he’d shutter its compliance division, build a privately held corporation and create an exchange.
Boosters could trade on the future value of athletic programs, shielding the NCAA against antitrust liability and providing a mechanism to compensate athletes.
Lawyers, he said, have “de-commoditized” college sports.
“The Sorsby case is just a symptom of this disease,” Braig wrote. “Where there are lots of lawyers, there are exploding transaction costs. They go together like chocolate and peanut butter.
“The NCAA is more than 20 years late and is in the desperate position of begging Congress to save its members from the exploding transaction costs that have resulted from its inaction.”
Braig became blunt.
“This is not a place where any business wants to be. The NCAA is doomed.”