Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby enters treatment amid gambling probe

Brendan Sorsby’s move from Cincinnati to Texas Tech was supposed to make him one of college football’s most watched quarterbacks in 2026. Instead, Texas Tech said Monday that the senior from Denton, Texas, had taken an indefinite leave of absence to enter a residential treatment program for a gambling addiction.

The case lands at the center of a program that had invested heavily in Sorsby and expected him to anchor the Red Raiders’ season. Texas Tech’s official spring roster listed him as a senior quarterback, and the school’s bio said he earned All-Big 12 second-team honors in 2025 and was Pro Football Focus Offensive Player of the Year that same season. Multiple reports in January 2026 placed his NIL package at about $5 million for the season, a figure that made him one of the highest-paid players in the sport and one of the marquee additions from the transfer portal.

Sorsby began his college career at Indiana in 2022, where Indiana’s roster said he appeared in one game as a true freshman and made his debut against Penn State. He later transferred to Cincinnati, where he played the last two seasons before arriving in Lubbock. ESPN reported that sources said he made thousands of online bets on a variety of sports through a gambling app, including wagers on Indiana football in 2022 while he was redshirting. The report said the bets were placed to win and not on the one game in which he appeared.

The regulatory stakes are substantial. Under NCAA wagering rules updated in 2023, student-athletes who try to influence the outcomes of their own games or provide information to bettors can face permanent loss of collegiate eligibility in all sports. The association also says student-athletes may lose scholarship aid depending on the violation. While the NCAA says it does not comment on pending investigations, it says it takes sports betting seriously and works with integrity-monitoring services and state regulators.

Sorsby’s situation also exposes the scale of the problem schools are trying to manage. The NCAA says it monitors more than 22,000 competitions each year and has educated more than 300,000 student-athletes about betting risks. Its harm-reduction materials say more than half of Americans ages 18 to 22 have engaged in sports betting, and a 2024 NCAA student-athlete study found betting participation among 22% of male student-athletes and 5% of all student-athletes in women’s sports. Texas Tech said it is committed to supporting Sorsby through recovery and protecting his long-term health and well-being, but it gave no timetable for his return. That leaves the biggest questions hanging over Lubbock: how far the NCAA inquiry reaches, whether any wagers touched games he played in, and whether a program built around star transfers can contain a gambling culture that now sits much closer to the locker room.