By admin 
In recent years, college sports have become an unregulated, high-stakes environment in which players are paid directly by schools and can transfer an unlimited number of times. But there are still some firm boundaries that nearly everyone agrees shouldn’t be crossed: gambling, for example. If you’re an athlete who gambles on your own team’s games, you shouldn’t be allowed to play. That’s how it works in the pros, where athletes such as Pete Rose and Jontay Porter received lifetime bans for betting. (Rose was controversially reinstated after his death.)
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That’s what should’ve happened to the quarterback Brendan Sorsby, whose conduct isn’t debatable. During his single year playing for Indiana University, from 2022 to 2023, Sorsby made 2,900 bets—40 of which were on his own team, according to court documents. After transferring to the University of Cincinnati ahead of the 2024–25 season, he bet on Cincinnati men’s basketball; upon ending up at Texas Tech University earlier this year, he placed wagers on professional golf, the NBA, and MLB. In total, Sorsby bet at least $90,000 over four years, and sometimes used betting accounts registered to friends or family.
Shortly after Sorsby entered rehab for gambling addiction in April, regulators in multiple states opened investigations into his betting activity. Last month, the NCAA, the governing body for college sports in the United States, deemed that Sorsby was ineligible to play in the upcoming season. But last week, a Texas judge decided to wave away a pretty clear red flag. On June 8, Sorsby was granted a temporary injunction that would have allowed him to play this fall, potentially setting what would be a worrying precedent across college sports.
Ultimately, the NCAA and Texas Tech were spared significant embarrassment because Sorsby opted to apply for the NFL supplemental draft after meeting with school officials earlier this week. The supplemental draft is for players who typically have college eligibility or have faced disciplinary issues, and who become draft-eligible after the year’s NFL draft has taken place. The NFL still has to approve Sorsby’s application, but it’s possible he could be in the pros before long.
Nevertheless, Sorsby’s ordeal served as another example of the NCAA’s declining power. Sorsby’s attorneys framed his gambling addiction as a mental-health issue; Judge Ken Curry, who granted the injunction, agreed, writing that Sorsby would “suffer a probable, imminent, and irreparable injury” if he were unable to play for Texas Tech. The ruling was a come-to-Jesus reckoning that the NCAA surely never anticipated, demonstrating just how much the organization’s power is built on a house of cards. For most leagues, this would be an open-and-shut case; a ban from the sport would never be challenged. But the NCAA is in a different category. Other leagues have a collective-bargaining agreement in which rules and infractions are agreed upon in collaboration with the players. The NCAA doesn’t have that, so any practices the organization sets can be challenged in court. In recent years, the courts have been ripping apart the NCAA rule book, prohibiting the organization from imposing limitations on transferring, and allowing players to return to college play after having gone pro.
As long as the NCAA refuses to accept reality—that its student athletes are something closer to employees than to amateurs—the ecosystem it’s supposed to protect will continue to be degraded. The organization’s overall failure to construct a comprehensive, equitable system that treats the players as true partners subject to clear-cut rules has led to the current scenario, where if Sorsby had played, it would have leveled the entire sport’s credibility.
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Instead of dealing with the mess it created, the NCAA has chosen to beg Congress to help by passing the bipartisan Protect College Sports Act. If passed, the bill would give the NCAA a limited antitrust exemption, allowing the organization to unilaterally set its own rules. Whether the bill will pass is uncertain. Although some aspects of it would provide helpful systemic changes, such as creating more uniform policies related to discipline and eligibility, it would also wrench power away from the students and back toward the colleges.
A big reason for the chaos is that colleges have repeatedly shown that they will do whatever it takes, whether moral or immoral, to win. Nobody was forcing Texas Tech to play Sorsby in the fall. If not for the enormous backlash—which included a conference lawsuit and threats of a boycott by other schools—the Red Raiders would have happily held their noses and competed for the national championship that eluded them last year. Adding a talent like Sorsby presumably would have gotten them closer to winning it all. (They were also paying him a reported $6 million.)
But the lenient touch toward one of the game’s worst violations reflects a problem that’s only continuing to grow in the broader sports world. A recent survey revealed that one in three adults from the ages of 21 to 44 had wagered on sports before turning 21. Surely, Sorsby isn’t the only player who will be tempted to cash in. The lure of gambling is everywhere now that almost every major sports league has financial relationships with betting companies.
A crisis was averted, but the boundaries in college sports are still in danger of fading. The judicial system has shown the NCAA in recent years that without it having a real structure, maintaining any collective standard of conduct will be impossible
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