Former Indiana quarterback Brendan Sorsby filed for an injunction against the NCAA this week, seeking his eligibility for the 2026 college football season.
Sorsby is currently ineligible to play for Texas Tech due to violations of the NCAA’s sports gambling rules.
He says his gambling addiction spun out of control when he was a freshman at IU in 2022, and acknowledges he placed wagers on Indiana’s games when he was a member of the team that season.
A court filing indicates the bets Sorsby placed included small wagers on Indiana games, in the range of $5 and $50.
Sorsby said in affidavit included in the filing that he never placed bets against IU or any of his teammates in Bloomington, and rationalizes his actions by suggesting he made those wagers to feel closer to the game and his teammates.
“To be clear, I never placed any bets ‘against’ Indiana or against any players on the team,” Sorsby said in the affidavit according to multiple reports. “I never used any non-public information that I knew about the team in deciding what bets to place. My bets were purely intended to make me feel more connected to the game and my teammates and to give me more of a reason to root for my teammates. Because the Indiana football team was not a very strong competitor in 2022, I lost most of the bets I placed.”
Indiana went 4-8 in 2022. Sorsby appeared in one game that season, a 45-14 home loss to Penn State in which he threw an interception and was sacked twice. There is no indication he placed a wager on that contest.
But by the end of his first year in Bloomington, Sorsby had a problem.
“In retrospect, by the end of my freshman year at Indiana, I was truly addicted to gambling,” he said in the court filing. “I began placing hundreds of bets on anything and everything, including non-major doubles tennis tournaments and the Major League Baseball draft.”
Sorsby returned to IU in 2023 and played a significant role, emerging as the full-time starter over the back half of the year. He would throw for 1,587 yards with 15 touchdowns and five interceptions.
He transferred out of the IU program in late 2023, before Curt Cignetti was announced as the next head coach.
Sorsby went on to two successful years at Cincinnati, and became one of the most coveted quarterbacks in the transfer portal this offseason.
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