Another Stupid Decision

A local Texas judge has allowed a college football player to play this year after he was suspended for gambling on his team.

Texas Tech quarterback (above left) Brendan Sorsby had an injunction lifted this week that will allow him to resume playing football at Tech even though he has admitted to gambling hundreds of times including multiple times on his own team. This has caused a tsunami of anger and outright shock by the college sports community.

Many teams have told their athletic departments that they are not allowed to schedule any games against Texas Tech, in any sport, for this year. Many are wondering what in the hell was that judge thinking with his ruling. He either has no understanding of sports, or he is a season ticket holder for Texas Tech and was using his position to tip the scales his way.

While there have been gambling issues in college sports in the past, this feels different. Not only because a player known to be gambling has been reinstated to his team, but because these kids now have more money than they know what to do with all due to another judges ruling in favor of something called the NIL.

I'm not going to get into the ugly details of what and how the NIL came to be, you can Google it easily enough, but this has allowed young people to be paid huge amounts of money in order to play for a specific team. The team with the biggest money donors are the winners while smaller schools with less rich alumni are left in the dust.

Now, in an act of compounding stupidity, some states are allowing high school athletes to receive NIL money too. Nothing says common sense like giving a seventeen year old hundreds of thousands of dollars before graduating high school. A recent story I saw told of high school seniors executing elaborate prom dates for fifty, sixty, and seventy thousand dollars, including renting cars that cost over a hundred thousand dollars and arranging to pay for entire hotels for his friends. I mean, come on.

What exactly did the sporting world think was going to happen when they started to allow sports betting sites to advertise their games? Did they not think that kids watching games, live or on TV, wouldn't see the logo's of these sites plastered all over the damn place like they won naming rights? I'm not a teenager, but I played one a hundred years ago, and I can remember that I was not only impressionable but stupid too. I'm pretty sure kids haven't gotten that much smarter since then.

Today's youth, the Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids, have been exposed to so much more than us old folks ever were, but that doesn't make them smarter. Yes they can take a computer apart and fix it and we can't figure out how to retrieve our accidently deleted emails, but can they get the eight track tape back in the cartridge without help?

This young man that is now going to be the poster child for cheating because of this misguided judges ruling is not the only kid gambling on sports while playing them, trust me. There are plenty more where this came from and some will be exposed while others will never see the light of day, but it is happening and it has been happening for decades. There has always been too much big money floating around sports, college and pro, for there not to be gambling going on at a level that would shock most of us.

When the NIL first came to be I applauded the fact that college kids that were being used to generate revenue for colleges would finally get to share in some of the profits, but nobody ever expected it to get this out of control. There are players that will actually have to take a pay cut to go from college to the pros because of how much money they are receiving right now. That is just not the way it should work.

As for gambling by players, the only way you are ever going to stop this is to kick off the landscape anyone ever caught doing it, forever. Also, the time has come to eliminate gambling sites as sponsors of games and to not allow them to advertise on tv or radio during games. As for Texas Tech, they need to do the right thing and suspend this player, despite what the judge says.