FRISCO — As much time as the college football world spent discussing the Brendan Sorsby gambling scandal from late April into June, Texas Tech football coach Joey McGuire insists his players went about their business more or less as usual.
“I believe if you walked into our building every single day and walked into the weight room and the workouts and our football schools, you wouldn’t know that anything was going on,” McGuire said on Tuesday, July 7, day one of the annual Big 12 media days.
Tech is coming off a 12-win season, a Big 12 championship, and a College Football Playoff appearance at the Orange Bowl. The Red Raiders were blindsided on April 27 when news broke that the NCAA had opened an investigation into Sorsby’s previously undisclosed gambling and that their new quarterback was leaving the program for a monthlong addiction treatment center in Arizona.
In subsequent court filings, Sorsby acknowledged making more than $90,000 in impermissible wagers, ignoring regular reminders that NCAA athletes are forbidden from gambling on sports, with few exceptions.
Sorsby and the Red Raiders have parted ways, leaving McGuire and his staff waiting for Will Hammond to fully recover from his season-ending knee injury last October. Tech starts practice on Aug. 5 and hosts Abilene Christian in a Sept. 5 season opener.
McGuire, speaking from the stage at The Star, credited team captains Ben Roberts and Sheridan Wilson, among other team leaders, for keeping teammates’ minds on their day-to-day training. McGuire said he met with Roberts and Wilson multiple times to solicit feedback on what they wanted to do.
“They’ve been incredible,” he said. “We’ve got a really strong leadership group — Cam Dickey, J’Koby Williams, Howard Sampson, guys like that — and really strong people. They kept us focused on football. At no point did I feel, over the last few months, that anything’s taken away from the football, as far as in the building.”
The Sorsby drama came to a head on June 15 when the Big 12 filed a federal lawsuit seeking declaratory judgment and injunctive relief that would give the conference authority to use its bylaws to punish Sorsby if necessary. Tech, which had stood behind Sorsby to that point, announced hours later that he wouldn’t play for the Red Raiders this season.
On June 23, the NFL declined to hold a supplemental draft that would have given Sorsby a path into the league for this season.
“To bring a team together, shared success is part of it,” McGuire said, “but shared adversity brings you even closer. The last couple of months, we’ve gone through some adversity.”
Now the Red Raiders will turn their attention back to winning the Big 12 title again and making a better showing in a CFP. Though the Big 12 didn’t poll media members for an order of finish for the second year in a row, a USA TODAY Sports Network panel predicted Texas Tech to successfully defend the title.
The only program to win Big 12 football titles in consecutive years was Oklahoma, which did so three years in a row from 2006-08 and four years in a row from 2017-20.
“We want to do something that very few teams have been able to do,” McGuire said, “and that’s to win the Big 12 championship again. But I think it’s really important that this conference gets multiple teams in the playoffs.
“I think there’s an obligation as programs in this conference that we play at a high level, and then I think it’s really important that we win in the playoffs. Until we do that as a conference, we’re going to continue to have the same narrative that we have right now.”
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: How Texas Tech football team managed Brendan Sorsby drama
Reporting by Don Williams, Lubbock Avalanche-Journal / Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Don Williams, Lubbock Avalanche-Journal | USA TODAY Network
