Cincinnati warned about Brendan Sorsby gambling before 2025 season

Cincinnati’s athletic department had been alerted to Brendan Sorsby’s gambling issue before the 2025 season began, a timeline that now puts the University of Cincinnati’s response under a brighter institutional spotlight. The key issue is not only what Sorsby did, but what administrators knew, when they knew it, and whether they handled the warning through the proper NCAA and internal channels.

Sorsby is now at Texas Tech, where the school said he was taking an indefinite leave of absence to enter a residential treatment program for a gambling addiction. Texas Tech coach Joey McGuire said the program supports Sorsby and is focused on his well-being. The move came after reports that Sorsby, a former Indiana quarterback, had placed a bet on Indiana in 2022, when he was a redshirt freshman, on an Indiana win in a game he did not play in.

The broader allegations are more serious still. Reporting said Sorsby made thousands of bets through a gambling app over several years, including wagers tied to Indiana football games. That pattern raises questions that go beyond one improper bet. It tests how a major athletic department responds when warning signs appear early and how aggressively it documents, escalates and enforces betting-related concerns before they grow into a public case.

The NCAA still bars student-athletes from betting on college sports, and violations can bring permanent loss of eligibility and scholarship loss, subject to reinstatement review. In 2023, Division I changed reinstatement guidelines so that betting on one’s own games or sharing betting information can start from permanent ineligibility. The association later approved a policy allowing bets on professional sports beginning Nov. 1, 2025, but the ban on college sports wagering remained in place.

That regulatory backdrop matters because schools have been pressed to do more than simply warn athletes. The NCAA has expanded its anti-gambling education, including the Draw the Line campaign and an e-learning module aimed at more than 500,000 current and prospective student-athletes. The effort reflects a sport-wide concern that betting access, social pressure and integrity risks have all intensified since legal wagering expanded after the 2018 Supreme Court ruling.

Sorsby’s case now sits at the intersection of player welfare, compliance and enforcement. Cincinnati’s early awareness, Texas Tech’s treatment decision and the NCAA’s strict wagering rules leave one central question hanging over the case: when the warning surfaced, did the institutions involved move fast enough to protect the athlete and the integrity of the sport?