The Pulse Newsletter 📣 | This is The Athletic’s daily sports newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Pulse directly in your inbox.Good morning! Familiarize yourself with the nearest restroom today. Inside:
A Wreck: Gambling ruined his NIL payday. Now what?In 2022, now-Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby bet on his own team’s games. The NCAA learned about it in recent months and is investigating the matter.What happens next here is not, historically, a mystery. The modern NCAA did not tolerate this specific thing before sports betting was legal all over and still doesn’t. Remember the six basketball players who provided inside information to bettors and allegedly fixed outcomes? Banned last year, obviously. But even less nefarious betting infractions have gotten the same treatment: Iowa State quarterback Hunter Dekkers got the permaban after placing bets on his own team to win in 2021, when he was a backup. There is no nuance here.But Sorsby and his legal team are trying to pull an unprecedented rabbit out of their hat. This week, Sorsby sued the NCAA in federal court in Lubbock (where Texas Tech is), angling for a sped-up investigation of his bets and an injunction that would make him eligible to play.The details of the case are right here, via The Athletic’s Justin Williams. Sorsby’s team points out that his bets on his own team came roughly four years and two schools ago, when Sorsby was a teenage scout teamer at Indiana. Sorsby says he “rationalized placing those bets as a way to feel more connected to the team” and that his gambling became a “compulsion.” He placed some degenerate bets on things like Turkish basketball, Romanian soccer and doubles tennis matches. He also bet on other teams at his own school while at both Indiana and Cincinnati, where he developed the past few years into a Big 12 star. That itself is a huge no-no under NCAA rules, given the potential for inside info to spread.A couple of thoughts:
