ESPN’s Josh Pate Talks Brendan Sorsby Injunction Controversy with Rich

When the news broke that a Lubbock judge had granted Brendan Sorsby an injunction clearing him to play this season, Josh Pate assumed somebody was messing with him. The host of Josh Pate's College Football Show joined Rich to sort through it, and his first reaction said everything about how strange the story is.

"It's unbelievable," Pate told Rich. "I was on a meeting this morning when the news broke, and I thought it was one of the satire accounts, because there are a lot of those out there. So I didn't even think it was real." He had been in Lubbock the week before. The vibe there, he said, was not hopeful. Then a retired judge who holds no degrees from Texas Tech changed the math entirely.

For Pate, this was not just another odd headline in a sport that produces them daily. He called it the breaking point for the NCAA. Betting on games as an active participant, he argued, was always the one red line that clearly sat inside the organization's authority. "If you cannot govern the matters that are in your lane, you don't exist. You're just four letters," he said. The NCAA, in his telling, was "a poodle that barked in the microphone and convinced everyone it was a Doberman for a long time." Now, he said, it's done.

The logic behind the ruling drew no mercy from Pate either. With the injunction order pulled up, he pointed to the paragraph arguing that Sorsby would suffer "probable, eminent, and irreparable injury" if he could not play or benefit from coaching, and named the obvious problem. "Up until five minutes ago, those were called consequences of making bad decisions or breaking rules," he said. By that reasoning, he noted, the threshold collapses entirely. The athlete "could have looked at the spider cam and hit go on a bet, and this would still apply."

Rich, speaking as a dad, translated it into terms any parent would recognize. Take a kid's phone away as punishment, he said, and imagine the kid running to a judge to argue that the penalty denies the right to scroll Instagram and text friends, and that real harm will follow. It sounds absurd, Rich admitted, and neither of them is a legal expert. But the comparison held, because the court's reasoning would apply no matter how the bet was placed.

So what fixes it? Rich handed Pate the wand. His answer was blunt. College athletics has no central authority the way the major pro leagues do, and short of powerful institutions voluntarily giving up some autonomy, he doubts one ever arrives. The alternative path exists, he said, and the people in charge want nothing to do with it: collective bargaining and labeling athletes as employees, which the system has effectively done already without writing it on the helmet in Sharpie.

Pate's frustration was aimed at leaders who, in his words, screwed it up for years, took no real accountability, and still want to be in charge while conceding nothing. Charlie Baker says Congress needs targeted legislation, but Pate sees the same people who begged for governance now pushing back on a Senate bill that would provide it, because it costs them a little control. Run out the clock long enough, he warned, and the big programs just take their ball and go play their own game. Rich signed him off as the voice of reason.