{"id":612009,"date":"2026-04-28T22:04:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T22:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/612009\/"},"modified":"2026-04-28T22:04:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T22:04:08","slug":"the-brendan-sorsby-gambling-scandal-is-a-reckoning-for-college-sports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/612009\/","title":{"rendered":"The Brendan Sorsby gambling scandal is a reckoning for college sports."},"content":{"rendered":"

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One of college football\u2019s most important and recognizable players will almost certainly never play another down at this level. Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby, who transferred from Cincinnati in a multimillion-dollar deal in January, is under NCAA (and perhaps law enforcement<\/a>, though Indiana authorities haven\u2019t said) investigation over thousands of his sports bets, including some particularly bad ones. ESPN reported that in 2022, when Sorsby played for Indiana, he bet on his team to win<\/a>. (ESPN reports he didn\u2019t play in those games, a distinction that might help him the tiniest bit.) Texas Tech announced Monday<\/a> that the 22-year-old has entered a \u201cresidential treatment program for a gambling addiction.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the dynamics in Sorsby\u2019s case is uniquely tragic, even in this vast sea of similar scandals. Sorsby has likely made a few million dollars over the past few seasons as the QB at Cincinnati via NIL, and he was set to make something around $5 million<\/a> at Texas Tech this year. Despite this, On3 reported<\/a> that Sorsby made a habit of attending Reds games and placing live wagers from the stands on whether certain pitches would be balls or strikes. The bet amounts were between $1 and $2.50. The reported bets on his own team are why it\u2019s so unlikely Sorsby plays college football again, but it\u2019s the incessant live betting on balls and strikes that makes his story a public policy case. It just shouldn\u2019t be this easy for someone with so much ahead of them to sacrifice their money and career at the altar of DraftKings and FanDuel.<\/p>\n

Those bets might have been enough to end Sorsby\u2019s career on their own. Though the NCAA recently liberalized its rules to avoid being forced to harshly punish every college athlete who wagers a few bucks on pro sports, the volume of those bets might have been enough to get him banned<\/a>. That\u2019s even before considering the gravest sin the NCAA thinks Sorsby committed: betting on his own team\u2019s games. Most of us aren\u2019t good enough at sports to find ourselves betting on our own team\u2019s games, but some of the details of Sorsby\u2019s case should be a warning even for those of us who aren\u2019t starting quarterbacks.<\/p>\n

The sports betting industry has a way of painting every busted athlete as a success story for legalized gambling. The sportsbooks would argue that the player only got caught because of the highly mechanized, public nature of the betting market. This argument is both correct and disingenuous; the player wouldn\u2019t have been caught if he were betting with a private bookie, but he also may not have been betting at all if he needed to find his own private market maker. Reasonable people will go in circles forever about whether specific cases are proof of the industry\u2019s maturity or proof of its corrupting effect. Sorsby\u2019s case is an unambiguous black mark for the entire enterprise of legal sports betting, though. Before computerized and heavily advertised online sports betting, it was not possible for a random college student to place mountains of small bets on individual events within a ballgame.<\/p>\n

Sportsbooks make this much easier than their financial industry peers. If you have a brokerage account at, say, Fidelity, and you want to buy an exchange-traded fund that tracks the price of Bitcoin, Fidelity will make you check a big, scary box attesting that you understand the risks of dealing with such a speculative currency. Even at Robinhood, one of the least scrupulous brokerages, someone who wants to trade stock options needs to go through at least a nominal approval process<\/a>. You can probably still do it, make no mistake, but it might take you a few minutes, and there\u2019s a chance you\u2019ll get caught in red tape. There is no similar process for someone to place a bunch of microbets during a live sporting event, or to place parlay wagers that account for a huge chunk of sportsbook profits<\/a> (because they are terrible bets).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Alex Kirshner
\n Prediction Markets Are Becoming a National Security Problem
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<\/a><\/p>\n

In a more old-timey version of sports betting, someone like Sorsby wouldn\u2019t have time to walk back and forth from a betting window and wager on whether some Cincinnati Reds pitcher was going to throw a ball or a strike. The game moved too quickly. But in this phone-dominated version of sports betting that we actually have, not only does Sorsby have the time to place a bunch of those bets, but he has no real gating mechanism to stop him. There is no grizzled attendant at the window to look at him with a raised eyebrow as if to ask him, \u201cYoung man, are you sure you want to place this bet with such terrible expected value?\u201d The sportsbooks\u2019 apps are all really good, and they make placing bets look like pure fun.<\/p>\n

Call me a purist, but I\u2019ve always found a certain honor in sports betting in its simplest form: A sportsbook sets a line, and a bettor feels confident enough in their view of the game that they think they can make the right call about 54 percent of the time and take some of the book\u2019s money. Call me naive, but that\u2019s what I thought most sports betting would look like after the Supreme Court struck down a law in 2018 that had prevented states from legalizing the practice. But the sportsbooks have turned much of the betting experience into a pure sugar rush, one in which someone doesn\u2019t just bet degenerately on events with little information and bad odds but does it repeatedly without ever pausing to think about it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Some Weird Looking Wires Showed Up on a Road in England. They Didn\u2019t Do What They Were Meant To. They Were a Sign of a Larger Problem.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The $2 Bets That Ended a $5 Million Career
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

This new world is working well for a handful of sportsbooks, and for prediction markets that function as sportsbooks while enjoying a friendlier regulatory environment<\/a>. It is working well enough for the big professional leagues, which collect sportsbook sponsorships and, probably more importantly, sometimes get a ratings bounce from people who are watching their games with a vested interest. (Disclosure: I have earned money from sports gambling advertisers and media companies, though not for several years.) Is it working for anyone else, though? Sports bettors losing money shouldn\u2019t be surprising\u2014where else would you expect sportsbook profits to come from?\u2014but the manner of our collective losses seems both sleazy and unsustainable. Retirement accounts are suffering<\/a>, and debt collectors are finding lots of work<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The system is screaming out for more friction, for an experience that will make more people pause for a second before lighting their money (or, worse, their life) on fire. It should so obviously be illegal<\/a> for anyone to deposit funds into a betting account with a credit card. But for now, it isn\u2019t. It should so obviously be as hard to place a parlay or bet on a specific pitch as it is to trade other financial instruments that have historically offered much better returns. Maybe those reforms wouldn\u2019t have saved Sorsby, who is alleged to have broken one of the longest-standing and most obvious rules in sports. But the sports betting industry we actually have is one designed to encourage moronic behavior. To whose benefit? Not yours.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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