Court-erback Parlay: The Sorsby Case and the Fragile Future of NCAA Governance

How the high-stakes eligibility battle further exposed the fractured system, and why collective bargaining is the only durable fix.

Carter Hanson

Aug. 26, 2026

Brendan Sorsby was one of the top quarterbacks in last offseason's transfer portal, reportedly receiving an NIL package worth approximately $5 million to play for Texas Tech this upcoming college football season. That all changed in late April when Sorsby checked into an inpatient treatment program for a gambling addiction, and an NCAA investigation soon followed. It has since emerged that Sorsby placed more than 9,000 bets over the last 4 years, including more than 40 on the Indiana Hoosiers in 2022, none of which involved a game in which he appeared. Per NCAA Bylaw 10.4, any student-athlete caught wagering "shall be ineligible for further intercollegiate competition, subject to appeal for restoration of eligibility."

Sorsby sued the NCAA on May 18th, the same day Texas Tech formally declared him ineligible, a move the school needed to make in order to pursue a reinstatement request, which it submitted the following day. The NCAA denied that request on May 22nd. Texas Tech announced it would appeal on May 26th, and the NCAA denied the appeal on June 5th. On June 8th, Judge Ken Curry sided with Sorsby, issuing a temporary, eligibility-granting injunction after finding Sorsby demonstrated a “probable right to relief” and would "suffer a probable, imminent, and irreparable injury" without such an injunction. Following the backlash that ruling provoked, Sorsby abandoned his campaign for a final college season and applied to enter the NFL Supplemental Draft only to have that door closed as well. His decision to end the legal battle may have spared college sports a months-long legal meltdown, but it by no means solved the legal issues underlying NCAA governance. In fact, the now-defunct case further illustrates how the NCAA's governance structure is coming under increasing pressure from a four-pronged legal parlay.

Each of these four legal theories challenging NCAA and conference governance has its merits, but each is also flawed in its own way, as the fractured legal landscape of college athletics now makes clear. The problem still needs to be solved, and courts have proven that they are not the answer. A collective bargaining agreement (CBA), as in professional sports, could offer a stable, binding eligibility system that does not depend on the determination of whatever judge is forced to weigh in next.

Sorsby and Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss have pioneered a contractual theory of harm in their respective eligibility cases against the NCAA. Their arguments hinge on their status as intended third-party beneficiaries (non-parties to a contract who obtain legal rights from it) of the contract between the NCAA and its member institutions, the universities. As intended third-party beneficiaries, the NCAA owes them certain duties, most importantly, a duty of good faith and fair dealing. Both players obtained preliminary injunctions on the grounds that they were likely to prevail in their cases alleging that the NCAA violated these duties in assessing their eligibility appeals. This theory avoids the complexity of antitrust claims but is limited by its narrow scope, which applies only to the NCAA, not to third parties like conferences. This may explain why Sorsby relented when the Big 12 sued Texas Tech, while Chambliss’s win held because the SEC did not intervene.

Before the Sorsby and Chambliss cases, antitrust theories of harm were the primary means by which student-athletes contested NCAA eligibility determinations. These cases are stronger because they can in principle bind both the NCAA and conferences, since antitrust theories don't depend on being a party to a specific contract.  Plaintiffs argue that both the NCAA and its conferences engage in horizontal restraints (agreements among competitors that restrict competition) that suppress the labor market by determining player eligibility. Consequently, the evidentiary burden is much more difficult for the player to prove, especially in an individual case, when they must show that rule didn’t just hurt them, but that it harmed competition in the broader market. Some players, like the West Virginia transfers in Robinson v. NCAA, succeeded in obtaining another year of eligibility via injunction, only for the Fourth Circuit to vacate the injunction in April and send the case back, by which point the season was already done. Meanwhile others such as Wisconsin cornerback Nyzier Fourqurean won at the district court, lost on appeal in July, and asked for an injunction pending trial, which the court sat on long enough that he missed the season anyway.

Class action antitrust lawsuits, such as Alston v. NCAA, have proven to be the most foolproof theories of harm against the NCAA. By gathering a class of student-athletes, it is significantly easier for plaintiffs to attain the evidentiary burden that individual student-athletes often struggle to meet. That said, class action cases are notorious for their lengthy timelines, with Alston taking seven years from filing to final resolution at the U.S. Supreme Court. As a result, class action suits are essentially useless for student-athletes who need a short-term resolution, even if they could assemble a class.

The other significant, if untested, legal theory arising from the Sorsby saga concerned possible institutional- and state-level antitrust claims. As part of the backlash against Sorsby's June 8th injunction, universities and conferences raised the idea of boycotting Texas Tech in football and even other sports over their backing of Sorsby. In response, Texas Tech Board of Regents Chair/mega-booster Cody Campbell and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton threatened to sue competing universities and conferences for antitrust violations over what they perceived as illegal collusion. Those claims could have merit, especially if the boycotts were implemented as conference-wide agreements rather than by universities making decisions individually. Ironically, that threat is also a bit self-defeating, as they would essentially be arguing that agreements between competing universities, the same kind of horizontal arrangement that forms the NCAA and its conferences, are antitrust violations. This may be why Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond described the threats as “meritless” and “facially absurd,” and why the Big 12 filed suit against Texas Tech and Paxton, seeking a declaratory judgment that sanctioning the university under its bylaws is protected by the First Amendment and would not constitute an antitrust violation.

If implemented, a CBA between the NCAA/member institutions and student-athletes would effectively address the flaws the courts have struggled with in judging the theories of harm outlined above. First, the parties would agree to an eligibility dispute-resolution system, with players able to negotiate its structure as parties to the contract rather than relying on courts to recognize them as third-party beneficiaries. That system would also ensure eligibility decisions are reached before agreed-upon deadlines, whether before professional drafts or the start of the collegiate season. Finally, a CBA would help college athletics avoid the antitrust issues it has wrangled with for more than a decade because of the non-statutory labor exemption. The non-statutory labor exemption limits, but does not wholly eliminate, antitrust liability for terms agreed to in a CBA and is what permits professional sports leagues with CBAs to have salary caps and drafts with slotted compensation without facing antitrust liability. As such, a CBA now presents the most compelling route forward for college athletics. Implementing a CBA would require the NCAA to accept athletes as employees, a fight it's resisted for years, and who the employer would even be (the NCAA, conferences, or schools) remains unresolved. But as the Sorsby case proved, the alternative is that every eligibility dispute becomes a legal roll of the dice.

To a certain extent, the chaos the NCAA and its member institutions now face is a reckoning for decades of profiteering at the expense of student-athletes under the guise of amateurism. That said, the seemingly never-ending saga of legal battles over player eligibility needs a long-term solution that the judicial system has shown itself to be ill-suited to provide. As such, it is time for the NCAA to stop gambling on the courts and Congress to save its governance authority. Instead, by going all in on the same collective bargaining model that has shielded professional sports for decades, the NCAA can end this legal headache and usher college athletics into its next era.