Rival Programs Reportedly Weighing Texas Tech Boycott After Brendan Sorsby Ruling

On Monday, Judge Ken Curry may have turned Texas Tech into the college athletic equivalent of a pariah state.

Curry, a district judge in Lubbock, Texas, granted Sorsby an injunction to play for the Red Raiders in the 2026 season. The ruling seems to have taken the college sports industry by complete surprise, as Sorsby admitted in an affidavit to repeatedly betting on Indiana while on its roster in 2022.

According to Ross Dellenger of Yahoo! Sports, Texas Tech’s rivals are now contemplating a form of frontier justice for a program that has unflinchingly rallied behind Sorsby in recent weeks. Two athletic directors have raised the possibility of a boycott of the Red Raiders.

Kansas State and Georgia’s athletic directors have taken direct aim at Texas Tech

Wildcats athletic director Gene Taylor called Curry’s ruling “f---ing bulls--t.”

“We’ve had some serious conversation about it,” Taylor told Dellenger in his Monday afternoon piece. “There is still a lot to be discussed. We aren’t scheduled to play them this year, but it’s something we have to look at from a college football perspective. This is greater than the Big 12.”

Texas Tech’s conference opponents this season are, alphabetically: Arizona, Arizona State, Baylor, Cincinnati, Colorado, Houston, Oklahoma State, TCU and West Virginia. These teams, it would appear, would have the ultimate say if they banned together as a group.

FISCHER: Brendan Sorsby Ruling Shows There Are No Rules Left for College Sports

However, the Red Raiders may have bigger problems than the Big 12.

“I think there needs to be serious conversations about not playing Texas Tech in any sports,” Bulldogs athletic director Josh Brooks told Dellenger. “We cannot in good conscience put our student-athletes on a field where the competitive integrity of the contest is compromised and overridden by the courts.”

Dellenger’s article further included damning quotes from an anonymous Big 12 athletic director (“lowest point in my time in college sports”) and veteran college sports attorney Tom Mars (“at first, I thought it was a joke”).

Well, tell us how you really feel, everyone.

A glimmer of hope for the mythical “skinny bill”

The nature of Sorsby’s admitted actions—repeatedly wagering on the Hoosiers while playing for them, which carries a lifetime ban even if the bets weren’t placed on games in which Sorsby played—has the appearance of a potential catalyst for what has, to date, been a mythical “skinny bill.”

BREER: Brendan Sorsby on the Field at Texas Tech in the Fall Will Bring His Gambling to Life

The “skinny bill,” in college sports speak, is a hypothetical bipartisan law that would codify basic tenets of college sports that few reasonable people would disagree with. It is most often used in reference to eligibility, but it seems evident that hard-and-fast gambling rules would fall into that category—especially as Americans grow more and more squeamish about the sports gambling explosion that has followed Murphy v. NCAA in 2018.

Sorsby may have won the war in court, if a brief struggle for an injunction can be called that. But will he win the battle—not just for his eligibility, but against a college-sports-industrial complex frustrated by years of deregulation and looking for an impetus for change?

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