Former Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby, in a new documentary, says he has “a ton of regret” over the betting saga that ended his college football career and rocked college sports.
“I know how quickly things can go wrong,” Sorsby says in his first public comments since he was ruled permanently ineligible by the NCAA earlier this year. “Everything can get ripped from you.”
His comments are part of a four-part series on Texas Tech football titled “The Program,” which premieres Friday on Paramount+, chronicling a dramatic offseason for the Red Raiders on the heels of a Big 12 championship and College Football Playoff berth. Advance copies of the series were viewed by The Athletic.
The doc features behind-the-scenes access at Texas Tech during Sorsby’s months-long battle for eligibility, after the quarterback transferred to Tech in January on a one-year deal worth north of $4 million. The fourth and final episode includes a sit-down interview filmed near Dallas after Sorsby left the Red Raiders program in mid-June.
“I couldn’t watch sporting activities without wanting to have something at stake, wanting to have some skin on the game,” Sorsby says in the documentary, describing his gambling habits during two seasons each at Indiana and Cincinnati, including betting on his team as a member of the Hoosiers.
“Whenever I got to Tech, same deal. Making more money than I ever made in my life, no reason to gamble. And yet I still did it,” Sorsby adds. “Just chasing a dopamine hit, and that’s where you lose yourself. … I’m walking around the facility and nobody knows that I have a problem gambling. Once I got found out and got caught, I went to rehab to fix my problem. And here we are.”
Sorsby entered a 30-day rehab facility in April to treat his gambling addiction and admitted to wagering at least $90,000 on more than 9,000 bets over the course of his college career, according to court documents. Sorsby sued the NCAA and briefly won back his eligibility via a Texas state court, but he ultimately dropped the case and left Tech amid legal uncertainty, including a counter lawsuit by the Big 12 against Texas Tech.
“I was on the phone with my parents and agent and I’m sitting there bawling my eyes out,” Sorsby says. “In my head I’m thinking I just threw everything I’ve worked for my entire life out the window. Like, it’s over.”
He was later denied entrance into the NFL’s supplemental draft this summer and is training for the 2027 NFL Draft next spring.
The tension surrounding Sorsby’s legal fight — and Texas Tech’s support for its quarterback — generated real animosity between the Red Raiders and the rest of college football, with many casting the program as a defiant villain. The documentary captures how Tech embraced that sentiment, including head coach Joey McGuire telling his players in a team meeting: “We are the most hated team in the country. I love it. We are now the hunted.”
Even though Sorsby has moved on, those feelings are still fresh for many involved, particularly within the Big 12, and will no doubt carry into the 2026 season.
“Looking back on it, I know that Texas Tech and I handled everything with integrity, and we did things the right way,” Cody Campbell, the prominent Tech megabooster and board of regents chair, says in the documentary. “I think this is something that could have been handled much more privately. We’re not going to forget about that, and I don’t think they’ll forget about it either when we’re up by 40 and still throwing the ball in the fourth quarter. That’s where the retribution will come.”
Sorsby’s gambling saga is the through line of the four episodes, and something director Micah Brown had to adjust for on the fly. Brown and his team began filming in Lubbock, Texas, in January, capturing hundreds of hours of footage over the last eight months. Tech’s high-profile addition of Sorsby via the transfer portal was an obvious focus of the doc during the initial months, but when news of the gambling issues broke and spiraled into the biggest story of the offseason, the documentary had to pivot as well.
“Definitely throws a wrench into your plans,” Brown said in an interview with The Athletic. “You hope that there’s drama, but that drama is usually position battles or how people are coming together. This was not great for (Texas Tech), but it was kind of great for this show.”
In a scene from Episode 1, before the betting scandal came to light, Sorsby describes his transfer to the Red Raiders after growing up in Texas. He talks about going to high school football games on Friday nights and eventually playing in them, and also mentions driving with friends to the WinStar World Casino about an hour north of Dallas, just across the border in Oklahoma, where you can legally gamble at age 18.
“Go play a little blackjack with the fellas when you’re 18 years old,” Sorsby says. “All you do is talk about it and then you finally get to do it. Definitely fun times and good memories growing up.”
What registered to Brown as a throwaway detail in the moment turned out to be a telling piece of foreshadowing. Episode 3 opens with a team meeting on April 27, the day news broke of Sorsby’s gambling addiction and the NCAA investigation.
“Our quarterback is going through some stuff right now, Brendan Sorsby. He checked himself into a rehab this morning in Phoenix,” McGuire tells the team. “He has a very serious gambling problem. It got to a point that he knew he needed to do something about it.”
The final two episodes include footage of McGuire sitting down with team leaders to hash out how the locker room is handling things; Sorsby’s return to the Tech football facility after winning the initial lawsuit ruling, where he’s welcomed back by teammates and coaches; and the public backlash that led to his eventual departure.
“Even when things happened, (Texas Tech) didn’t kick us out or stop talking to us and try to get out of the deal,” said Brown, a former walk-on for Kansas football who also directed the Netflix “Untold” documentary on Michigan sign stealer Connor Stalions and two seasons of the “Coach Prime” Amazon series on Deion Sanders. “They allowed that process to see its way out. I’ve done a lot of these (documentaries), and that’s super rare.”
The Sorsby ordeal is not the only storyline, though even arcs like backup quarterback Will Hammond recovering from a knee injury — which likely would have been featured regardless — took on greater significance. Hammond is slated to start for the No. 12 Red Raiders in Saturday’s season opener against Abilene Christian in Lubbock.
Despite Sorsby’s unexpected exit and all the fallout that came with it, “The Program” portrays plenty of optimism from a Texas Tech football program aiming to improve on last season and make a national title run in 2026. Now with some added motivation and a longer list of critics.