Sports’ Inevitable Gambling Crisis Has Arrived with Brendan Sorsby

It is quite literally impossible to watch any major sports broadcast in America and not see an ad for gambling anymore. What was once viewed as the ultimate sin is now the proud business partner of the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS and NCAA. The last of the bunch spent years publicly railing against betting on sports and resisting its integration at every turn, as NCAA President Charlie Baker said in 2024 that “Sports betting issues are on the rise across the country with prop bets continuing to threaten the integrity and competition and leading to student athletes and professional athletes getting harassed.” One year later, the NCAA agreed to deal with Genius Sports to sell its data to sportsbooks. I guess the “integrity and competition” and harassment issues that gambling brings with it weren’t as important to the NCAA as getting a cut of the blood money the professional leagues have been swimming in for years.

Which brings us to incoming Texas Tech star(?) quarterback Brendan Sorsby providing every sports league with a preview of a terrifying future that likely is hiding around the corner for each and every one of them. NCAA rules stipulate that if a player gambles on their own team, they are permanently ineligible to play. Sorsby admitted to wagering at least $90,000 on over 9,000 bets, including at least 40 on Indiana football when he was on the Indiana football team, saying he has a gambling problem, and the NCAA banned him for life. This week, Judge Ken Curry of the 99th District Court in Lubbock County which houses Sorsby’s new team, Texas Tech, ruled that the NCAA cannot enforce its own rulebook, and suspended Sorsby for just the first two games of the season but said he can play after that. Assuming nothing changes, come Texas Tech’s third game, the NCAA will become the first major American sports league to allow an athlete to compete after betting on his own games.

To be clear, this is entirely against the NCAA’s stated will, but when you’re making agreements with gambling companies you claim to be alarmed by while starting games in Michigan at 11 pm to satisfy West Coast TV agreements while asserting that Stanford is on the Atlantic coast, well, the complaints about Sorsby and concerns about player health and safety ring a bit hollow. Is there anything that isn’t for sale in sports now? It’s like seeing two paths diverge in a forest, one marked “safe and normal” and the other marked “filled with knives,” and choosing the knife-filled path and then complaining when you get stabbed. Sorsby, the highest profile transfer quarterback in the portal this offseason, is just the most clear-cut and depraved example of sports’ greedy chickens coming home to roost, but do you really think he’s the only NCAA athlete in their gambling business partners’ key demographic who is gambling on NCAA games? Come on, man. 

Do the professional sports leagues not think this is happening either? The belief by owners and executives seems to be that the leagues can spend all their commercial time encouraging every single man under the age of 40 to gamble on sports, except their own players. MLB seemed to dodge a huge bullet on this, as galactic superduperstar Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter was proven to have been making bets from Ohtani’s bank account, but how many other examples are there out there like Sorsby? Or Terry Rozier? Or Malik Beasley? Or Damon Jones? Or Jontay Porter? Or Emmanuel Clase? How far is this federal investigation into sports and its intersection with gambling going to go?

This is the chosen path of all major sports in America, where you can’t watch in-game action for more than two commercial breaks without having at least one in-game bet thrown in your face. In an age of cord cutting, live sports is king and its capitalist class is cashing in. We live in a world where the NFL is slowly abandoning Sunday to invade every other day of the week and several new countries. A world where March Madness is going to keep trying to expand and water down the product until it becomes February Madness. Where colleges are flying to Brazil for TV money and no fans are joining them and then the trips are getting canceled. Where student athletes and their education mean nothing to TV executives trying to fill every time slot they can. A world where Berkeley is now apparently in the Eastern Time Zone. Sports are now a place where words and logic and tradition mean absolutely nothing in pursuit of sucking up every last penny from anyone who wants to hand them one, even with the industry that sports identified as an existential threat right up until a generation of sports power brokers decided that their souls do actually come with price tags.

There’s a very good reason why sports refused to get into bed with gambling for a century after the Black Sox scandal marred a World Series and called the fundamental construct of the sport into question, and why the NCAA is at “DEFCON 1” over the Sorsby ruling, according to SEC whisperer Paul Finebaum. Texas Tech is a growing major power in college sports thanks to the influx of money by oil and gas tycoon Cody Campbell, who said of the Sorsby ruling that “This unfortunate situation is the outcome of a broken system.” This is disingenuous horseshit from a guy who has explicitly been trying to game a broken system to try to turn Texas Tech into Texas. I’m sure that a billionaire Texas oil guy who purchased his way into being one of the most powerful people in Lubbock had nothing to do with a Lubbock judge ruling that the star QB can play at the school in Lubbock in defiance of NCAA rules and everything that is holy in sports.

But this is sports now. Everything is for sale. You can’t let the wolf into the hen house and then be shocked when dinner time arrives. If you want to chase the almighty dollar to the ends of the earth, including into the industry who you say presents an existential threat to your business, don’t be surprised to find yourself dealing with some shady characters who bet on negative outcomes for their own team. The Texas judge bought the weak defense that Sorsby didn’t play in any of these games he bet on, and ruled that the incoming Texas Tech QB “demonstrated that he will suffer a probable, imminent and irreparable injury” if he doesn’t play football this year. This must be the first instance in American history of a Texas judge ruling entirely on the basis of protecting a man’s mental health.

There are no rules anymore, if there ever were. We live in an age of Kings, where democratic structures can be eliminated on the whim of the world’s first soon-to-be trillionaire, resulting in the deaths of at least hundreds of thousands of people. This process repeats itself in various iterations across the country in billionaire fiefdoms like Lubbock. Sports likes to pretend to be an escape from it all, a way to turn your brain off and stop thinking about all that ills society, but that attitude is just the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand. You think you’re escaping the world by watching a team financed by an oil and gas tycoon employing a QB who is playing thanks to an at best naïve and at likeliest, corrupt judge? You think spending your weekends watching football leagues financed by many of the same capitalists who funded Trump’s campaign is escaping it? That’s adorable.

Sports are politics and they always have been.

And now sports are infected by the greed that has poisoned the rest of our society and led America to worship a false idol shutting down a chunk of our biggest city so he can take a nap in the middle of the NBA Finals. All sports has is its integrity and now its owners have risked it all for DraftKings promos. Sports’ integrity is why it became a billion-dollar entertainment industry. It attracts gigantic live audiences under the belief that we are all watching an unscripted meritocratic drama unfold at the same time. We all come together as a community to root for a symbol of our local pride, and politics does actually recede into the background a bit as the magic of sports reminds us that we are all human, and it is fun as hell to watch humans at the peak of their athletic and intellectual powers play a silly little game.

But now that silly little game is sponsored by FanDuel and the players playing in it very easily could have gambled on their own stats. And now instead of coming together to root for their city, many sports fans are just hoping that Brendan Sorsby throws for 300 yards so they can complete one leg of their same-game parlay, and if he doesn’t, he will be flooded with DMs from people threatening him and his family. Gambling has sucked the magic out of sports, and turned it into a cynical financial instrument like stocks and crypto. These aren’t people we’re watching, they’re edges to exploit. The wonder is fading from sports, and it is being replaced by the same insatiable and cynical greed that has swallowed the rest of our society whole. Everything must be squeezed to death for profit under capitalism, including the fundamental integrity of sports, which you can now make a free over or under wager on Bet 365 using the promo code THISISN’TSUSTAINABLE!

It’s not clear what will happen next with Sorsby. The NCAA has appealed this objectively insane ruling, and the college football world is apoplectic, clearly seeing this for the existential crisis it is. The University of Georgia issued a memo to its staff decreeing that all their “athletics will not schedule future contests against Texas Tech until further notice.” Texas Christian University and Kansas State’s Athletic Directors both told ESPN on the record that “there has been informal chatter in the league about schools not playing Texas Tech this year,” and TCU AD Mike Buddie said, “we anticipate having conversations around it” at Big 12 meetings.

“The hypocrisy is consistent throughout our profession right now,” a Big 12 head coach told ESPN. “Nobody cares about the betterment of the game and its future anymore. Everybody’s in survival mode on how they can win and survive right now—college administrators, college commissioners and college coaches. That’s how it’s going to be until it f—ing crashes and burns.”

One of the best college football programs this century is already blackballing college football’s ascendant new power who has a friendly judge in their pocket. College football is not quite crashing and burning yet, but the plane’s engine has certainly caught fire while the Department of Justice pokes around next door. The Feds recently charged 26 people in an alleged bribery and point-shaving scheme that involved over 39 players on at least 17 different NCAA Division I men’s basketball teams across more than 29 games. What Sorsby represents and what coaches fear about him is already under federal investigation in NCAA basketball. Sorsby isn’t the beginning of the crisis, he’s just an overt admission that it is has arrived.

Gambling has always been in orbit around sports, and in some ways the legalization of it has been a big help, in that sportsbooks report large, unusual bets to the leagues (this is how big dummy Jontay Porter got banned for life by making gargantuan under bets on himself that no other human alive was placing). In a lot of respects, there is a far better way to track this stuff now than in the previous age of the darkness with local bookies and such. But the way that sports has shamelessly embraced gambling and covered every square inch of their broadcasts with it is like burning down your house to deal with a cockroach problem. Sure, it’s a good way to kill those cockroaches, but now you have no house to live in and also the people who live in it may have bet on it burning down. 

All sports really has is the idea that what we are watching is organic and pure, and if it turns into professional wrestling where DraftKings is advertising the bets made by the starting quarterback, then it’s an open question how many people will still want to watch sports when its fundamental integrity is in doubt. The Black Sox throwing a World Series are the big fear, but prop bets are their own kind of sinister attack on the competitive integrity of a game, as the goal does not become winning or losing, but just accumulating enough stats (or not) to win your bets on yourself. In an age of unchecked greed, it would certainly be fitting for one of the last shared and trusted spaces to lose its esteemed status atop the culture while chasing the only thing that matters to our crumbling society: the almighty dollar. Texas Tech has proven to be one of the most cynical operators in this “broken system,” but the leagues and their allies in politics who enthusiastically created the conditions for their players to bet on themselves are the ones who broke it, and all they have demonstrated so far is that none of them have any idea how to fix it.