It was 1:45 on a recent May afternoon when Lubbock Judge Phillip Hays saw the injunction hearing for Texas Tech football player Brendan Sorsby had been assigned to his 99th District Court. Hays made up his mind by the time he went to bed that night to recuse himself from presiding over it.
“I’m a huge [Texas Tech] athletic supporter,” Hays told The Avalanche-Journal this week. “I have 50-yard-line-seat tickets for football games. I have basketball tickets, go to probably six or eight baseball games a year. And having two degrees from there, having my wife with two degrees … My daughter went to college there.
“I just felt like the integrity of the court was more important than me being able to sit on the bench to hear this case. Not that my integrity would be impugned, but the fact that the integrity of the court needed to be upheld, and it shouldn’t be put out to public discussion as to whether the judge was biased in one way or another. So I felt that that was in the best interest of the court, the NCAA and Sorsby all getting the fair hearing that they needed.”
Sorsby, the Red Raiders’ high-profile quarterback transfer from Cincinnati, is permanently ineligible to play in the NCAA, having acknowledged repeated violations of NCAA rules against gambling at all three of his college stops: Indiana in 2022 and 2023, Cincinnati in 2024 and 2025 and Texas Tech in 2026.
Seeking to have Sorsby reinstated, he and his legal team, headed by prominent New York attorney Jeffrey Kessler, filed for an injunction against the NCAA on May 18.
News of Hays’ recusal came on May 20. A day later, Senior Judge Ken Curry was appointed to preside over the hearing, which took place on Monday, June 1. As of late afternoon June 3, no ruling had been made by Curry, a retired visiting judge from Tarrant County.
Hays has practiced law in Lubbock for about 36 years. He acknowledged the hot-potato nature of the case for someone in his position.
“There’s nothing lost on me being an elected official and having a voting group here in Lubbock County that elects me every four years,” Hays said. “That was not lost on me in making the decision either.
“But the fact that the integrity of the court needed to be upheld and not being put out on national media,” he indicated, was the main reason for his recusal. “Tech has been, for the last 18 months, subject to ridicule and discussion — even during the ladies’ softball tournament, about Tech’s money buys teams and this and that, and so are we buying a Sorsby just to be a championship football team? We need to get beyond that and not have a court play into that discussion as well.”
Curry told the court before the June 1 hearing began that he has a son-in-law who was a 2007 Texas Tech graduate. He said he has a daughter who was a scholarship athlete at UT-Arlington for two years, and a daughter and her family who have lived in Lubbock County since 2016.
Neither side took issue with those disclosures.
Had Hays not yielded his bench and ruled in Sorsby’s favor, cynics could accuse him of being a biased hometown judge. Had he stayed on and denied an injunction, he could have faced the wrath of Red Raiders fans.
“I thought it was a case that might be interesting and everything else,” Hays said, “and then I realized the ramifications of all of it, and it needed a … There should not have been any appearance of impropriety or [partiality] going into the case.”
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Recused judge says court’s integrity paramount in Brendan Sorsby case
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
