Brendan Sorsby bet more than $90,000 on games while he quarterbacked the football teams at Indiana University and the University of Cincinnati. Court records show that he began gambling in high school at casinos with friends and started experimenting with sports-betting apps that allowed him to make wagers on his phone before he was even 21—the legal age. Sorsby said he was enticed by introductory offers that allowed him to deposit a few dollars and receive hundreds in free betting credits.
When he got to college, Sorsby said he placed bets between $5 and $50 on his IU team to win. Soon he was placing thousands of bets, often on random events he didn’t follow, such as Turkish basketball games and Romanian soccer matches. “What started as a seemingly harmless activity with friends gradually spiraled into an uncontrollable compulsion,” court documents say. Now the player, who transferred to Texas Tech in 2026, has been diagnosed with a gambling disorder.
Sorsby’s story isn’t unique among college students. Researchers estimate that 6 percent of college students have a serious gambling problem, and men are most affected. A survey from the American Institute for Boys and Men found that 26 percent of young men age 18 to 24 have used a sports betting app, daily fantasy sports, prediction market or other gambling platform in the previous six months, compared to 14 percent of the general public. While there’s no evidence that those users will develop gambling addictions, psychiatrists who study gambling note that without fully developed adult brains, college students are more impulsive and less risk-averse when they’re betting. Age limits do little to prevent young people from betting: About two-thirds of adults report participating in at least one form of gambling before they turned 21. Meanwhile, prediction markets—increasingly seen as just as addictive as gambling—are accessible to 18-year-olds.
