Brendan Sorsby just blew up one of the strangest fights college football has seen in years.
The Texas Tech quarterback is walking away from the Red Raiders and applying for the NFL’s supplemental draft instead.
And according to Pro Football Talk at NBCSports.com there is a report he’s keeping the NIL money from Tech. It may be a good bet few folks in Lubbock are sad to see Sorsby gone.
Statement regarding Brendan Sorsby.
Long Live the Matadors! pic.twitter.com/FxPd00uT9L— Cody Campbell (@CodyC64) June 16, 2026
He’s also dropping his lawsuit against the NCAA, which pretty much guarantees his college career is done for good.
This whole saga traces back to a gambling scandal that broke wide open in April. Sorsby checked himself into a treatment program for a sports betting addiction and later admitted to placing more than $90,000 in bets across four years.
Court records showed he’d wagered on Indiana games and even on his own teammates back when he played for the Hoosiers in 2022 and 2023. Betting on your own program is about as serious as it gets in the NCAA’s eyes, and it cost him his eligibility.
Sorsby didn’t just accept that ruling though.
He took the NCAA to court and a Lubbock County judge granted him a temporary injunction on June 8. That ruling looked like it cleared the way for him to suit up for Texas Tech this fall, pending a formal trial set for February 2027.
For a few days the Red Raiders thought they’d dodged the whole mess.
The legal fight spiraled out of control
That injunction set off chaos across the sport almost overnight.
The NCAA appealed the ruling right away. The Big 12 weighed real punishment for both Sorsby and Texas Tech, including the idea of banning the Red Raiders from the conference championship game.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton waded into the fight too, and the Big 12 responded by filing for its own injunction so it could enforce its rules against the school.
Attorneys general from Oklahoma, Kansas and Utah backed the conference’s position.
By Monday the legal pressure had piled up from every direction.
The NCAA and the Big 12 both filed in separate courts trying to undo the win Sorsby had landed just a week earlier.
Reports out of NFL Network said Sorsby’s legal team planned to drop the lawsuit entirely, a move that clears the path for him to apply for the supplemental draft but also locks in his NCAA ineligibility for good.
Texas Tech’s defense crumbled fast
Texas Tech board chairman Cody Campbell pointed to the supplemental draft’s June 22 deadline as the deciding factor.
He said there wasn’t any realistic way to settle all the pending legal disputes and lock down Sorsby’s eligibility before that date arrived.
School president Lawrence Schovanec and athletic director Kirby Hocutt backed that up in a joint statement, saying the injunction put the university in a tough spot and that they stood by Sorsby anyway, even as plenty of people pushed back hard.
The Big 12 board of directors made its own stance clear too, saying schools shouldn’t field players who bet on their own team’s games.
Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark added that it had been a rough week for the conference and for college athletics as a whole, while wishing Sorsby well in whatever comes next.
Red Raiders left with nothing to show for it
Here’s where Tech ends up looking the worst out of everyone involved.
The Red Raiders backed a player accused of betting on his own games, fought a public legal war against the NCAA and the Big 12 and burned a chunk of their offseason narrative on a quarterback transfer who never threw a single pass for the program.
Now they’re moving forward with Will Hammond at quarterback, a guy who missed the spring while recovering from a torn ACL.
The supplemental draft angle adds another wrinkle nobody saw coming.
Sorsby hasn’t been picked in that process since 2019, and the NFL hasn’t seen a first round supplemental pick since 1992.
Some 2027 mock drafts had him going in the first round, and FOX Sports draft analyst Rob Rang gave him a second round grade with a notably high ceiling.
Whichever team takes him in the supplemental draft gives up a same round pick in the 2027 draft, so it’s not a decision teams will make lightly.
Texas Tech rolled the dice on a player nobody else wanted to touch and came away with nothing but a depleted quarterback room and a bruised reputation.
The Red Raiders fought hard for a guy who’s now chasing an NFL roster spot instead of suiting up in Lubbock, and that’s about as bad an outcome as a program can have after all that noise.
