The letter from the NFL to Brendan Sorsby on Tuesday was unsparing and inelastic. Message: We’re not fast-tracking a quarterback into the league with a history of breaking rules and laws when it comes to sports wagering. Maybe later, not now. Full stop.
This should be the final blunt rejection needed to get Sorsby, his lawyers, his agent and everyone else in his circle to realize the magnitude of his mistakes and how they affect his chosen field of employment. (Oh, and same message to Ken Curry, the wildly unserious Texas judge who breathed life into Sorsby’s attempt to play college football with a crackpot temporary injunction.) It took nearly two months to reach this point of clarity, but here it is: not playing football in 2026 was, is and shall be the best path forward for a quarterback recovering from a gambling addiction.
It’s unfortunate that the message had to be delivered from the outside of Sorsby’s circle, not the inside.
Sorsby and his enablers (which included Texas Tech leadership for a long period of time) tried to power through this with football as the end goal. Like many addicts, Sorsby did not voluntarily enter rehab—he went in after his pattern of gambling was discovered and threatened his college eligibility. After unsuccessfully battling the NCAA in the face of evidence of major rules violations, the next stop was the courtroom. A dubious victory there was eventually checkmated by the Big 12 in federal court. That’s when Sorsby gave up on college ball, or Tech gave up on playing him, or some combination of the two.
He did not give up on the NFL. Many a problem child has taken the supplemental draft route into the league, but this was a different situation—problem gamblers scare the hell out of every governing body in sports. Sorsby’s apparently flippant approach to joining the league via that option was shoved back at him Tuesday.
The NFL’s letter asserts that Sorsby’s petition for the supplemental draft does not “demonstrate accountability for your conduct or indicate whether, or how, you would adhere to the league’s rules and policies regarding the integrity of competition. Instead, even after receiving notice of the NCAA’s decision rescinding your college eligibility in May, you sought to avoid the consequences of that determination through litigation rather than accepting responsibility for your actions, and you pursued entry into the NFL only after abandoning those efforts.”
Yet even that body slam of a letter seemingly has not deterred Sorsby’s lawyer, Jeffrey Kessler, who has declared the NFL’s decision “a violation of the [collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and the players] and the law. We will pursue this immediately with the NFLPA.”
Is it really time for another legal battle in this saga? At what point does Sorsby tire of the fight—and of the legal bills from Kessler, whose services are not cheap? At what point do he and his people realize the toxicity around him and give up on playing football this fall?
As I’ve said before, sitting out the 2026 season doesn’t end Sorsby’s football life. If anything, it might enhance it, in the long run. Taking the time and finding the space to ensure that his non-football life is in order should be the priority. Diving into a high-pressure, high-visibility season in which every interception or incompletion carries cynical scrutiny sounds like a terrible situation for a recovering addict.
Call it a sabbatical. Call it a redshirt season. Call it a mental health timeout. Then enter the 2027 draft, present yourself as a healthy and hungry rookie to team executives, and make the most of whatever chance comes your way.
If it would be helpful to Sorsby’s recovery, he could even use a sabbatical season to become a powerful walking testimonial to the perils of gambling addiction. If that guy walks into a football team room on a college campus and tells his story, every single athlete is listening to every single word. There is no more vivid, real-world example of what impermissible/illegal sports wagering can take away from a young, rising star.
IC360, the gambling compliance firm, has former athletes who are recovering gambling addicts on staff; they deliver similar talks regularly. I sat in on one last year at Big Sky Conference media days, wherein a former minor-league baseball player detailed losing nearly a million dollars. His message arrived with a wallop.
Even if Sorsby doesn’t want to be a participant in getting the message out, the NCAA’s anti-gambling campaign has greater impact now. The association—and every member institution—can point directly to the consequences here. That should be a massive deterrent.
Sorsby himself might not yet be fully deterred from trying to play football this year. But after two months of trying to outrun all the consequences of his actions, he’s about out of real estate.
The NCAA said no. The Big 12 said no. Now the NFL has said no.
It’s time to sit this one out. Which might be the best thing that could happen to Brendan Sorsby.
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PAT FORDE
Pat Forde is a senior writer for Sports Illustrated who covers college football and college basketball as well as the Olympics and horse racing. He cohosts the College Football Enquirer podcast and is a football analyst on the Big Ten Network. He previously worked for Yahoo Sports, ESPN and The (Louisville) Courier-Journal. Forde has won 28 Associated Press Sports Editors writing contest awards, has been published three times in the Best American Sports Writing book series, and was nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize. A past president of the U.S. Basketball Writers Association and member of the Football Writers Association of America, he lives in Louisville with his wife. They have three children, all of whom were collegiate swimmers.
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