Wetzel: Sorsby ruling a temporary injunction that will cause permanent damage
Congratulations to Brendan Sorsby for winning a temporary restraining order against the NCAA that will allow him to play for Texas Tech in 2026 despite years of high-volume sports wagering, an admitted addiction to gambling and even placing bets (including two on negative outcomes) on a team he was on.
And congratulations to the Red Raiders for getting a star quarterback who makes them national title contenders … with significant drama on their season. Opposing Sorsby was never about Tech, it was about the sport as a whole, which right now has to deal with a temporary restraining order causing permanent damage.
Simply put, the decision Monday by Judge Ken Curry, who hails from Tarrant County (Fort Worth) but was brought into Lubbock County for this case, is ridiculous, short-sighted and illogical. That’s perhaps why Curry’s three-page order offered no significant justification.
The facts of the case are not in dispute. Sorsby wagered heavily over the past four years as a member of the Indiana, Cincinnati and, since January, Texas Tech programs — at least 9,000 bets totaling at least $90,000. This is a clear violation of NCAA rules that were repeated to him through repeated educational efforts.
That included bets made through accounts in others’ names that he could access and by sending money to friends to wager for him — details that show he knew his actions were wrong. It even included 40 on IU football games while he was a member of the Hoosiers’ program. Two of those bets were negative against Indiana, although Sorsby says he doesn’t recall making those.
This is third rail stuff in the world of sports. There is no gray area.
Protecting the integrity of competition is job one for any legitimate sports organization. If the public believes the games are compromised, people stop caring, watching and spending.
The NCAA was not merely 100% justified but 100% obligated to ban Sorsby from further eligibility pursuant to its rules, precedents and, most of all, common sense.
You can oppose and despise the NCAA for everything it does … except this.
Yet Sorsby and his very talented legal team of Jeffrey Kessler and Scott Tompsett argued that he deserved a temporary restraining order because he had been diagnosed with a gambling addiction, he had gone through a 35-day inpatient rehab and, by banning him from playing this fall, the NCAA would not be supporting his mental health and thus potentially negatively impacting his recovery.
Indeed, a person’s mental health is often negatively impacted by being caught for misbehavior and then having to deal with the consequences. That extends from imprisonment for criminal conduct all the way to a teenager getting grounded for blowing curfew.
Suggesting Sorsby has recovered from his gambling addiction is itself a ludicrous understanding of true addiction, where every day is one day at a time. Hopefully he never bets again, but this isn’t a broken bone that can be declared healed.
Furthermore, offering an avoidance of punishment because of an addiction actually rewards the heavy gambler over the athlete who, say, makes a mistake by placing a few bets on the NBA Finals this week. It’s like ticketing someone going 5 miles an hour over the speed limit but not the person going 50 over.
Curry isn’t saying Sorsby’s argument will prevail because that wasn’t his assignment. It’s just that Sorsby has the right to make the argument and that not allowing him to play until his day in court would cause “irreparable harm.”
This is the trick of modern jurisprudence against the NCAA, though. Sorsby won’t ever have to prove his case. It will almost assuredly be dropped after the season, and before any real arguments are made, because his eligibility will be exhausted anyway.
The swiftness of the season and the slowness of the legal process work in concert here.
Curry fell right into it.
Regardless, the message is clear: The NCAA is now the only known sports governing organization on Earth that has been barred from punishing someone for betting on their own team.
Full stop. No one else in the entire world thinks this is a good idea. There are no known groups even arguing that it might be. Not the NFL or NBA. Not the English Premier League. Not FIFA, not the International Cricket Council, not the Chinese Table Tennis Association.
Not anyone.
There are about 8.3 billion humans on one side of this … and Judge Ken Curry on the other.
“If this is the precedent, then I owe it to my players to bring in people from Las Vegas to teach us how to gamble,” an aghast Big 12 coach told ESPN on Monday. “Then collectively, we need to decide which games we will play hard in [to cover the spread] and which ones we won’t.
“I’m supposed to do what’s best for my players, and in that case they would be able to make a lot of money betting on our games,” he continued. “That’s the precedent for me.”
Extreme? Absolutely, especially since there are other criminal laws that prohibit such actions, but in terms of NCAA bylaws and eligibility and the common decency of competition … it’s not too much of a stretch.
The legal arguments that will result from this decision are going to be incredible — please, local judge, don’t let the mean old NCAA suspend me for repeated targeting and late hits; it will impact my mental health!
Brendan Sorsby got his season back. Texas Tech got its quarterback.
College athletics meanwhile has a mess on its hands, a very, very big one.
