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After getting caught placing $90,000 worth of bets on himself, star quarterback Brendan Sorsby has thrown in the towel on the remainder of his college career.
According to college sports publication On3, Sorsby has mutually agreed to part ways with the Texas Tech athletic department, functionally forfeiting the most pivotal year of his budding football career. The news comes after Sorsby filed a successful injunction in a Texas district court to reverse his senior-year suspension, enforced by the National Collegiate Athletic Association after his hundreds of sports bets came to light.
As we’d learned in previous reporting, Sorsby enlisted family and friends to place a slew of bets on games he was playing in during his time as QB at Indiana University. The NCAA takes a zero-tolerance policy toward players betting on any college sports, with those who bet on their own organization taking a gamble on permanent loss of eligibility.
Instead of spending his much-anticipated senior year at Texas Tech, Sorsby will enter the NFL supplemental draft, On3 reports, a last stop for players who are ineligible for the full NFL draft. Given the timing of the whole debacle, he’s lucky just to qualify for that.
“Brendan and Texas Tech stand on very solid and legitimate legal ground, but he faces a June 22nd deadline to be eligible to enter the NFL’s supplemental draft, and there is no practical way to resolve all the various pending legal disputes and ensure his eligibility prior to this date,” Cody Campbell, chairman of the Texas Tech board of regents said, per the Associated Press. “This is the only viable and fair path for Brendan and his future, as well as for his teammates, and our university.”
While success stories can come out of the supplemental pool, it’s not exactly the cream of the crop, evidenced by the draft’s historically low success rate. As longtime NFL scouting consultant and sports writer Neil Stratton once observed, “comparing the supplemental draft with the NFL draft is like comparing a toy car with a Ferrari.”
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