The saga is over. Brendan Sorsby is headed to the NFL supplemental draft, his lawsuit against the NCAA is being dropped, and Texas Tech gets to move forward from what could be the ugliest month in program history.
None of that means the Red Raiders aren’t going to be very, very good this fall.
That’s the inconvenient truth hovering over the rest of the Big 12. The team that just spent three weeks turning itself into college football’s designated villain is still the one you have to beat. All the negative noise doesn’t change the fact that Texas Tech is still the favorite to win the Big 12 again, with a considerable gap between itself and the next tier of conference contenders.
That’s what happens when you have a billionaire booster, Cody Campbell, pouring tens of millions of dollars into the program. And then they almost blew it all up trying to keep a quarterback who admitted to placing more than 9,000 bets on sports over four years, including at least 40 wagers on his own team’s games while at Indiana.
The way Texas Tech handled the Sorsby situation was, to put it plainly, a mess. McGuire’s comments at the Big 12 spring meetings in late May — where he essentially acknowledged the school wouldn’t be fighting this battle if Will Hammond hadn’t torn his ACL — were as damaging as anything.
“If he’s not hurt, then we’re not talking about this,” McGuire stated.
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That’s honesty, sure. It’s also a confession that the framing around Sorsby’s well-being was at least partly a product of need. You can hold both things at once: Texas Tech may genuinely care about Sorsby the person and still have been motivated to fight by Sorsby the quarterback. The problem is that once McGuire stated the quiet part out loud, the compassion angle curdled.
Then came the 21-minute video. The one with McGuire, athletic director Kirby Hocutt, university president Lawrence Schovanec, and a senior associate AD sitting in a row, producing what amounted to the longest, most expensive press release in college football history.
The video wasn’t wrong about everything. Sorsby does have a clinically diagnosed gambling addiction; the injunction was granted by a judge (though a two-game suspension for someone who bet on his own team was its own kind of joke), and the university wasn’t a party to the lawsuit, but it read as defensive at a moment when silence might have landed better.
By Monday, with the Big 12 filing a lawsuit in Dallas federal court and the NCAA appealing the original injunction, Sorsby’s camp had no real choice. He withdrew the lawsuit, became ineligible again, and unveiled his plans to declare for the supplemental draft. Texas Tech and McGuire both released statements. The chaos, mercifully, ended.
What’s left in all this is still a really good football team.
Hammond, the former blue-chip recruit, is expected back by Week 3 against Houston. Before his ACL injury last October, Hammond was completing 69 of his 109 passes for 680 yards and seven touchdowns, while adding nearly 300 yards on the ground. The kid can play. In the meantime, Tulsa transfer Kirk Francis bridges the gap for the opener.
Beyond the quarterback room, the foundation remains. One of the Big 12’s best backfields returns intact, anchored by Cameron Dickey, J’Koby Williams and Quinten Joyner running behind an offensive line that returns three starters. No team in FBS has more career receiving production than the Red Raiders, with receiver Coy Eakin, tight end Terrance Carter Jr. and Pittsburgh transfer Kenny Johnson all combining for 4,629 yards and 36 touchdowns.
What about the defense that allowed just 11.8 points per game last season but lost six players to the NFL Draft? It still carries more career FBS snaps than any team in the country after it added a quartet of four-star transfers in defensive lineman Mateen Ibirogba, linebacker Austin Romaine, edge rusher Adam Trick and cornerback Davin Martin.
The rest of the Big 12 simply doesn’t have the roster depth or overall talent to close that gap, and that’s true even without Sorsby in the picture. Every projection, every preseason poll will still have the Red Raiders at the top of the conference.
So here’s where things stand: Texas Tech is going to be a playoff contender. It’s going to win a lot of football games. And almost no one outside of Lubbock is going to be rooting for them. They earned that last part.
Hate them if you want. Just don’t be surprised when Brett Yormark is handing Texas Tech the Big 12 Championship trophy again in December.
