FRISCO, Texas — The story of the offseason in college football involved a Big 12 school.But does that mean the Big 12 wants to actually talk about former Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby and the entire saga surrounding the will he, won’t he, he won’t roller coaster to get him eligible to play in 2026?No, not one bit it seems. As far as Sorsby is concerned around the Big 12, it’s see no evil, hear no evil, but you also better double down on speaking no evil. “Let me start off by saying I appreciate the question. I appreciate other questions that are probably going to come forth today. Today is not the time to address that issue,” commissioner Brett Yormark said. “Today is about celebrating the upcoming football season and celebrating our 16 schools.”Over the past few years, the league has done everything it can to attract attention to itself and the brand of competitive football it plays. Now it appears there is indeed a line you can’t cross when it comes to the old adage there’s no such thing as bad publicity. The line is the Cincinnati-turned-Red Raider signal-caller who just so happened to grow up 15 minutes from the Dallas Cowboys’ opulent facility at The Star, which the league has taken over this week. This year’s media days are clearly an attempt to turn the page on a story which captured rapt attention the past few months. Not a single question about Sorsby or the legal furor he brought about was asked at the main stage for TV cameras in the nearly two hours between Yormark and Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire stepping up to the microphone on Tuesday (and he received just a handful on the subject). There were other things front and center, such as the multimillion-dollar marketing deal which will brand the upcoming campaign as Monster Energy Big 12 football—one of the bigger red herrings you’ll find on the media day circuit this year.“I probably look at it a little different: None of my business, to be quite honest with you,” says Willie Fritz, the Houston head coach who opens Big 12 play at Texas Tech and would have been the first opponent Sorsby faced. “I have enough going on without worrying about those different things. I let the people in charge take care of all that stuff.”The people in charge were mad in real time and such feelings haven’t quite receded. Still, the less said the better for the conference. While there were a few athletic directors milling about The Star doing interviews, Tech’s Kirby Hocutt was not among them. After making an appearance and going through radio row at Big 12 media days last year, board chairman and out-front booster Cody Campbell left the country on vacation. That meant McGuire took any slings and arrows thrown his school’s way, even as he much preferred it when attention turned to figuring out how to repeat as champions for the first time in the Big 12 since Oklahoma did so in 2020.Brendan Sorsby is no longer part of the Texas Tech team, but will still be around the Red Raiders this fall. | USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect“I knew we’d get pushback and criticism, but you know it was at the conference level, in the AD level, [entire] conferences that surprised me,” McGuire says. “At the end of the day, I still feel that whenever you put the player’s interest, the player’s mental health and his physical health first, then I think that’s what’s important for what I do. I got in this to help men become the people they’re supposed to be.”Sorsby is still expected to get out to Lubbock this fall, and McGuire confirmed he will be involved with the team, training for next year’s NFL draft at the Red Raiders’ facilities and occasionally attending home games.“He’s working on his recovery from the addiction then he’s working on getting ready for the NFL draft next year,” McGuire says. “He is addicted. He’s a gambling addict. That’s something he’s going to have to deal with. If anybody knows anything about addiction, you deal with that every day of your life. He’s going to continue to deal with that, but he’s a really good person, he’s a great teammate—I think his teammates would tell you that. And talent-wise, he’s without question one of the most talented players I’ve ever been around.”A few of his peers walking around the halls disagreed with that effusive evaluation of Sorsby’s talent after seeing him play at Cincinnati in 2025. There was still a much more jovial and upbeat atmosphere among the coaching community to the Red Raiders’ presence at media days than you would expect for a school which did not go a week without generating some new headline this offseason. One Tech official even joked that if it had been an AD convention or a room full of conference commissioners, that would not at all be the case as McGuire spent much of his time cracking jokes with the likes of BYU’s Kalani Sitake or discussing vacation options with Oklahoma State’s Eric Morris. Perhaps that’s the result of a little more grounded reaction to a story—or simply a bit of myopia—depending on who you spoke to. One head coach mused that because it negatively impacted so many billion-dollar industries—college football, the NFL, TV networks and gambling—there was little chance Sorsby would have been allowed to play in the end, much less before the conference office called in some big legal guns.“I’ve never been one to talk about other people or other people’s programs,” says one head coach. “But obviously that’s been a cardinal sin for a long time in sports, and I think we would have been going down a rabbit hole and answering a lot of questions that aren’t good for the sport if he played.”The good news is that won’t need to be the case. The player everybody couldn’t stop talking about appeared instead to be persona non grata around the Big 12 as talk finally turned over to football matters to the delight of the league office.More College Football From Sports IllustratedListen to SI’s college sports podcast, Others Receiving Votes, below or on Apple and Spotify. Watch the show on SI’s College YouTube channel.Add us as a preferred source on GoogleFollow