After news broke on Monday morning that Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby was granted a temporary injunction against the NCAA in Lubbock County Court, allowing him to beat the rap for consistently betting on the teams he played for, the entire country reacted the same way. Outrage.

Unlike most other issues in college football, where there’s great variance in public opinion, there were two classes of people: Texas Tech fans who contorted their worldview to feel happy about Sorsby’s newfound eligibility and everyone else.

There was a groundswell of disgust from college football loyalists on social media, prompting oil billionaire and Texas Tech booster Cody Campbell — the money behind the Red Raiders’ rise to relevance — to battle people on the platform, X. One of Campbell’s posts was a prompt to X’s AI bot, Grok, asking it how many players on Georgia’s football team had been arrested.

Texas Tech is the Joker.

But is this the type of villain the Red Raiders wanted to be? The one that everyone universally despises, the one everyone feels shoved its way into this relevance because of a booster’s deep pockets, and, worst of all, the one that would sell its soul to the devil in order to win?

Is this how Texas Tech wants to arrive at the top?

What’s interesting is that Texas Tech was hated for the best reasons before the sun came up on Monday morning. In college football, there have always been haves and have-nots, and there has been a tremendous amount of gatekeeping about who is allowed in the club.

It doesn’t matter that Ohio State, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, and others have always invested more in their football programs, but now that Texas Tech wants to throw checks around, it’s a problem? It’s old money hating new money, which is the fundamental reason we all had to read The Great Gatsby in our high school curricula. Texas Tech was totally fine being hated because it was new money.

That new money brought Sorsby to Texas Tech. He was one of the crown jewels at the quarterback position in this year’s transfer portal cycle, and the Red Raiders were able to snag him away from other sexy buyers with a broad pen stroke. That made for more intrigue, as we watched a Big 12 program try to thrust itself into national contention in an SEC/Big Ten world.

But along the way, new money lost the plot. When Sorsby was busted for gambling — no, a pattern of heavy wagering over a four-year period as a member of Indiana, Cincinnati, and Texas Tech that totaled thousands of bets and at least $90,000 — Texas Tech had a choice to make. It made the wrong one.

Texas Tech could have dismissed Sorsby from the team then and there and gone with backup quarterback Will Hammond. The Red Raiders would have been worse off as a football team this year, but not out of College Football Playoff contention because Hammond showed flashes of brilliance. The entire country may have still despised them as a new-money outfit, but Texas Tech would have lived to fight in the next recruiting and portal cycles.

But no, Texas Tech stood by Sorsby as the quarterback mounted a legal charge to get this injunction. Now that Sorsby won, Texas Tech has no choice but to stand by him. It doesn’t matter that the rest of the entire sport is outraged, genuinely concerned about the integrity of the game, or the NCAA’s inability to even have rules, let alone enforce them.

There have been many NCAA — and, more recently, court — decisions that have been highly controversial. Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss’ lawsuit to sue his way into an additional year of eligibility struck quite a conversation a few months ago.

But this? Everyone knows it’s rotten, which is why you had news break Monday evening about potential directives from the SEC and Big Ten teams not to schedule the Red Raiders in any sports.

You could make the case that nobody has ever disrespected the game more than Sorsby and still continued playing. From baseball legend Pete Rose to Iowa State quarterback Hunter Dekkers, everyone understands there is a line that cannot be crossed in athletics. Sorsby crossed it over and over and over again. His penalty? A two-game suspension against teams Texas Tech could beat with their twos. Sorsby abused the system and will continue to play in it.

Everyone despises Texas Tech because of it.

“If you’re going to play The Joker, you don’t want to play The Joker without its arm. I want to play the villain,” a Big 12 head coach who is set to play the Red Raiders in 2026 told On3.

There are certainly football players who have done far worse from a moral and legal standpoint who have kept their jobs. There are plenty of players in the NFL who have hurt other human beings and kept playing, as reprehensible as that is in most cases.

Sorsby’s actions, though not as serious as some things we’ve seen in college football over the last decade, were offensive to the very nature of college football. His continued participation undermines the integrity of the game.

Texas Tech didn’t care. It steadfastly defended him. It wanted him on the team, not because its chief concern was helping him beat addiction, but because it believed Sorsby gives the Red Raiders the best chance to win in a College Football Playoff game.

It’s easy to hate that, even if you’re someone who respected — and was entertained — by what Campbell had done up to this point in talent accumulation.

Literally last week, Texas Tech was a lovable disruptor. When Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian took a public swipe at Texas Tech and Joey McGuire fired back with the ‘Longhorns are scared’ campaign, it was lovable. It was intriguing. You could root for Texas Tech to keep annoying the big, bad Texas machine. That’s also true because McGuire is a genuinely good human being, one of the nicest men you’ll ever come across in life.

Now?

The general public is rooting against Texas Tech for a completely different reason. It isn’t about gatekeeping, spending money, or doing things in an unorthodox way. This isn’t the pure form of The Joker.

Texas Tech has become all about continuing with Sorsby as the face of the program, knowing full well it would be disgusted if something similar happened elsewhere. The Red Raiders were too pot-committed with Sorsby — apologies for the gambling analogy — to veer off course, defending their guy who has yet to even take a snap in Lubbock.

This isn’t about how many players have been arrested at other places, regardless of what Campbell posts on X. This isn’t about what other programs have sacrificed to get a star player on the field. We have known since the beginning of time that morals have been compromised at other places to win.

This is about Sorby’s actions being disrespectful to the integrity of college football and the fact that nobody has done worse and been able to continue playing the sport in the history of organized competition. Texas Tech didn’t care, and now it’s dealing with the fallout.

This isn’t something people are outraged over in June and will forget by September. This is the new brand of villain Texas Tech became. It’s not pure like the new-money Joker. This one is a dirty Joker.

So let’s pretend Sorsby is everything he is cracked up to be on the field. He throws for 4,000 yards and 40 touchdowns and leads Texas Tech on a deep CFP run. Let me ask a simple question:

Is this how Texas Tech wanted to arrive at greatness?

I’d venture to say: Probably not.