‘That’s Some Bull----’: Power 4 Coaches Rip Brendan Sorsby Saga, Texas Tech’s Involvement

The conference media days that dot the month of July are colloquially known as “talking season,” and there was no shortage of topics for college football coaches to opine on this year during an offseason that did not lack for storylines.

Amid plenty of congressional machinations, a historic arbitration case testing the limits of NIL, the ongoing College Football Playoff expansion debate and the usual bluster about doing something different when it comes to NCAA rules, there was one topic which dominated the headlines.

That would be Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby, whose gambling addiction and subsequent legal wrangling in an attempt to play for the Big 12 favorite was front of mind for many—and apparently still is. Sports Illustrated spoke with more than 40 coaches across the Power 4 conferences to get their unvarnished thoughts on the fight to play the signal-caller and few held their tongues on the matter.

“That’s some bull----,” says one animated coach. “There’s not one coach, one player, that does not walk into a college football team on the very first day where you’re told, Don’t bet on it. Bottom line, don’t bet on it and Title IX, everybody learns about that first day.”

“He should not have been allowed to play [by the judge]. Whether it’s Brendan Sorsby or John Smith, that’s not right,” one ACC coach says. “Just like with tampering and the Ole Miss coach and Dabo [Swinney], there should be consequences. But there’s not any of that right now in the sport.”

Indeed, if there was a common sentiment from the entire saga that coaches understood well, the lack of enforcement around fairly obvious rules was chief among them.

Several pointed out that this is not limited to the Sorsby case amid ongoing complaints about the College Sports Commission and the lack of progress the NCAA has made on tampering investigations. But for most, the ability to find a local judge and garner a favorable ruling surrounding a player seems to have ushered in a new meaning to the wild, wild west conditions most have been operating under these last few years.

“That’s a total failure of college football and the NCAA overall,” says one Big 12 coach. “What are we doing now? We just said everything goes. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

“How do you walk into your players and say, ‘You’ve got to follow these rules.’ And then you just give people outs when they don’t follow the rules,” says a coach from the ACC. “We’re in an interesting place in our game and that was one of those interesting moments.”

Just about every coach acknowledged that they addressed the Sorsby story with their own players, and conference offices across the country continue to provide additional resources in terms of education on the subject in addition to the stringent monitoring they do with integrity firms.

Not one coach, however, expressly said they brought in a guest speaker to discuss the perils of gambling this offseason as most focused on making sure their own teams knew what is firmly in the rule book.

“Nine thousand bets, that’s ridiculous,” laments a veteran coach. “You’ve got DraftKings and all these apps on the phone and it’s so easy for kids to place a bet. So you’re always having to educate them on gambling and all the risks.”

“It was going to be a really hard message to tell my guys, you can gamble on your team and have no punishment,” says another. “There’s a zillion reasons why that is the third rail. You never touch that and it’s the one thing everyone can agree on. I think that is the most difficult part, trying to explain that we’re accountable for our actions but, well, not really in this case.”

The vast majority of head coaches who spoke to SI were quite critical of Sorsby and the Texas Tech administration for pushing as hard as they did to make him eligible to play this season. Several cited the school’s board chairman, booster Cody Campbell, as being particularly problematic in turning a fairly straightforward story into a drama that ran nonstop this summer.

At the same, there was a subset of coaches—particularly in the Big 12—who did commiserate with Red Raiders counterpart Joey McGuire for handling things as best he could given the difficult situation of trying to show they were advocating for one of their players. Several more even felt quite a bit of sympathy for the QB—even while recognizing how wrong he was to have crossed a line you don’t go near in the first place.

“I feel for that kid, because now the rest of his life is going to be impacted by the situation. I respect him because I feel like he didn’t run from it. He didn’t dodge it, he owned it. But at the end of the day, too, it’s not right either,” says one coach. “I don’t think we’re helping the situation, by the way, with how we’re promoting gambling and all that kind of stuff.”

“The argument that he bet so much that he ought to have been allowed to play was a bit of a strange argument. Even with one bet, the integrity of sporting events is what makes them watchable. If Sorsby [had played], it would have opened a really bad can of worms,” says a Big 12 coach. “I was surprised Tech chose to die on that sword. That didn’t make a lot of sense.”

Far clearer was the ultimate resolution, with Sorsby essentially spending the entire coming season out of football after he withdrew his lawsuit against the NCAA and was subsequently denied entry into the NFL supplemental draft. A handful of coaches who had either played or coached in the league were not surprised that there was a firmer hand applied to the situation from NFL headquarters, with one joking it might be one of the few times he’s agreed on something football-related with commissioner Roger Goodell.

Interestingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, there were also a few who viewed the entire episode a little more myopically and expressed fewer qualms over potentially playing Sorsby this fall if he had taken the field.

“If he had been allowed to play, I think as a staff we would have been like, ‘F--- it, let’s play,’ ” says one Big 12 coach. “But it would have been up to [my athletic director] and [my school president] to sort out. I don’t think they would have viewed it the same.”

A Big 12 athletic director from a different school said as much and relayed that they wouldn’t be surprised if, quietly, some schools may follow in the footsteps of Georgia and Nebraska in refraining from scheduling any nonconference games with Texas Tech moving forward.

The Red Raiders, for the most part, are at least not living in denial that the broader college football world remains seething over their actions, even weeks removed from the Sorsby story finally moving off the front page and the arrival of training camp just days away from getting underway in August.

“There’s a target on our back. I thought there was a target on our back last year with what we did in the portal,” McGuire says. “There’s definitely a target on our back with the situation we have with our quarterback. It really is us against everybody.”

On that, he is very much spot on.

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