Responding to a national uproar and the renewed possibility that he would never play another down as a college quarterback, Brendan Sorsby switched gears this week and decided to take his game to the NFL instead of Texas Tech.
Declaring for the NFL’s supplemental draft was a wise bet by Sorsby, even though the dramatic change in course comes only a week after he won a specious ruling in a Texas court that would have granted him a final season of college eligibility to make millions playing for his new school in Lubbock.
The ruling had been the latest example of an ever-deteriorating college sports landscape, in which the schools not only buy their players but help them fight the eligibility rules to which the colleges themselves had agreed.
It is bad enough that friendly state judges have been willing to give star athletes the benefit of the doubt in squeaking out an extra year of eligibility with after-the-fact medical redshirts or the fuzzy math that doesn’t count the years playing junior college ball. But the Sorsby decision cut even deeper, undermining the integrity of the sport by overriding the NCAA rule that betting on your own team, no matter the reason, is unforgivable.
The judge, in blocking the NCAA from declaring Sorsby ineligible over his gambling habit, said he was trying to spare the player from irreparable harm. Obviously, it wasn’t that irreparable, since Sorsby already had the option to declare for the NFL supplemental draft even before the court’s interference.
The judge also appeared to buy the arguments of the player’s attorney and Texas Tech that Sorsby should not be held accountable for his chronic gambling in college because it’s the result of an addiction and an anxiety-driven compulsion. That’s like saying to other college athletes, “If you are going to gamble on sports, don’t just bet a few times. Do it thousands of times so that you will have the addiction defense if you get caught.”
The public wasn’t buying that argument. Neither was the NCAA nor Texas Tech’s own league, the Big 12, both of which took separate legal actions Monday to try to overturn the judge’s decision.
Clearly, Sorsby has a gambling problem, even if he didn’t start seeking help for it until after the NCAA had begun investigating a tip about the quarterback’s online betting activity over the past four years. Thousands of impermissible bets worth at least $90,000 on college and pro sports, including on his own team while at the University of Indiana, are evidence that he was hooked on gambling.
The schools that enrolled him — Indiana, Cincinnati and Texas Tech — maybe should feel a moral obligation to help Sorsby get treatment. But what Texas Tech was attempting to do could instead have prolonged his illness, since addicts rarely change their self-destructive behavior until they suffer the consequences and hit rock bottom.
The explosive growth of sports betting in America has infiltrated the games and caused some leagues to rethink their historically strict guidelines for athletes. There is, though, a reason that the NCAA, as with most professional sports leagues, has stood by its cardinal rule that betting on your own team or even your own sport is a permanent disqualifier. Once the fans believe the athletes are wagering on the games, the fans lose all faith in the fairness of the outcomes. Let that happen, and their interest withers. Who wants to watch any athletic competition, other than perhaps professional wrestling, when the result is rigged?
The only way to maintain that integrity is to come down hard on those who violate it, no matter what their sad story is.
