ESPN’s Josh Pate Talks Brendan Sorsby & Texas Tech Controversy with Rich

Josh Pate watched the Brendan Sorsby saga go from a favorable courtroom ruling to a full retreat in eight days, and he laid out exactly how it unraveled.

When the injunction came down and Sorsby looked highly likely to play for Texas Tech, Pate thought the school had one shrewd move: say nothing. The vast majority of the college football public viewed the decision as a loophole, not justice, and nothing Texas Tech said was going to move opinion. Instead, the school released a 22-minute video featuring five people Pate knows and respects, who were largely telling the truth. It didn't matter. The optics buried it, and nobody bothered to watch.

The real turn was legal. When Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sent a letter on Texas Tech's behalf, Pate said, it opened a can of worms, handing the Big 12 and its member schools the recourse to return the serve. Within 24 hours the dam broke. With Sorsby declaring for the supplemental draft, Pate believes it's best for all parties, sparing everyone an ugly Big 12 media days and week one full of rival states chasing injunctions and headlines.

Pate doesn't think the relationship between Texas Tech and its conference thaws anytime soon. He sensed a real movement among the league's other schools, all in lockstep that Sorsby shouldn't play there, and offered West Texas's us-against-the-world culture as context for Texas Tech's combative posture. The lingering effect, he said, is a program feeling some type of way toward its own conference, and nobody forgets this.

Rich pressed on the human cost, noting that a 22-year-old quarterback should be wrestling with the pressure of playing the position, not serving as the avatar for everything wrong in college athletics. Asked how Sorsby is actually doing, Pate was honest: to his knowledge, Sorsby hasn't spoken publicly, wasn't around the building, and hasn't been heard from. He made the deeper point that if the gambling addiction is authentic, and he believes it is, that reality doesn't vanish when the eligibility fight ends. Addiction has no off switch, and until Sorsby speaks, how he's doing is anyone's guess.

Pate also believes the Sorsby camp badly underestimated the blowback, because within the sport the integrity of the games is paramount and betting is the bright line. The NCAA has stumbled on bigger societal matters, from Baylor to Penn State, but enforcing a rule as basic as you can't bet on the games should be squarely in its purview. The NCAA, he argued, thought it could game the calendar, win the injunction, drag it out, and play the season, and misjudged how unwilling the public was to swallow a gambling case. That, he said, is why crisis-management firms get paid so much, to see through the fog.

Rich tied it together with the Planes, Trains and Automobiles meme casting Texas Tech as a laughing John Candy and the Big 12 as a livid Steve Martin, and isolated the accelerant. It wasn't the NCAA seeking an expedited ruling. It was the Big 12 declaring it should be able to suspend Sorsby, and Paxton filing preemptively, which pulled in attorneys general from other states. Pate agreed, relaying that people sharper on the law than he is have said point-blank: if Paxton doesn't write that letter, Sorsby is probably playing for Texas Tech this fall.