The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly
The UFC Freedom 250 gladiator fights on the White House lawn were not the only high-profile bouts this week. The conservative Attorneys General Kris Kobach (R-KS) and Ken Paxton (R-TX) faced off against each other in a high-stakes legal battle precipitated by the crisis of gambling on college sports.
At a cost of $5 million, Texas Tech had recruited a star quarterback named Brendan Sorsby for its football team. Then it was discovered that the 22-year-old athlete had gambled more than $90,000 on college sports, placing more than 9,000 bets including 40 on his own Indiana Hoosiers team while a freshman there.
Millions are wagered daily on sports due to the Supreme Court ruling in Murphy v. NCAA (2018), which invalidated the federal ban on sports gambling outside of Nevada. Some $167 billion is bet on sports annually now, most of it by young men, and the World Cup that just started is expected to become the most gambled-on sporting event ever.
Most parents would be shocked to learn that an estimated 30-50% of 16-year-old boys are placing bets through their phones today. Many of the college athletes of the future are betting on sports in high school.
The NCAA prohibits gambling on college sports by its players, but Brendan Sorsby is surely not the only college athlete who has been placing bets and the NCAA ban is difficult to enforce. He just happened to admit it, and the NCAA predictably reacted by banishing him permanently from competing in college football.
Not so fast, a Texas state court then ruled by reinstating him to play for nearly this entire season. The NCAA immediately appealed, while other colleges in its Big 12 athletic conference complained about the harmful impact on the integrity of the game.
Historically, players have been banned from competing if found to have gambled on teams in their own sport. The Chicago White Sox players who were caught fixing the 1919 World Series were banned from professional baseball for life.
Pete Rose was excluded from the Hall of Fame for the rest of his life after his gambling on baseball was discovered. His highly respected teammate, the Hall of Famer Johnny Bench, agreed with that ban based on Rose’s admitted gambling.
But as other colleges began threatening to boycott Texas Tech in their schedules, the conservative Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sprang into action. Epitomizing the sentiment of “Don’t mess with Texas,” Paxton indicated that his office would take action against any conference or college that ostracized Texas Tech.
The University of Kansas and Kansas State are members of the same Big 12 conference as Texas Tech. Their conservative Kansas Attorney General, Kris Kobach, then got into the game by saying that the conference and other colleges have the right to take Texas Tech off their schedules if Texas Tech allows an admitted gambler to play.
The Big 12 conference filed a federal lawsuit against Paxton and Texas Tech seeking a declaration of the athletic conference’s First Amendment rights to enforce its policy against gambling. Texas Tech had a state court order requiring the NCAA to allow Sorsby to play, but the conference sought a federal court order allowing it to discipline Texas Tech.
As all this drama unfolded, Texas Republicans were holding their biennial state convention in Houston. The delegates approved strengthening their platform against gambling, in a state where pro-gambling interests spent more than $10 million in the primaries to try to expand gambling there.
Sorsby has not been charged with any crime. Sports gambling is legal today in roughly 40 states, and in the other 10 states people are doing essentially the same thing on so-called prediction markets like Kalshi.
The NFL has been permissive about this issue, and allowed another player who bet on college sports, Kayshon Boutte, to play in the NFL without any suspension. He was accused of placing 8,900 bets while playing college football, and admitted that he bet until he “was completely broke.”
“I’d wake up early in the morning, and the first thing I'd do was bet,” Boutte explained. “I’d stay up late and bet. All day. All night. I had insomnia, so if I woke up in the middle of the night, phone next to the bed, I'd bet.”
On Monday, Brendan Sorsby entered the supplemental NFL draft, so that he might be selected to play for an NFL team rather than for Texas Tech. To become NFL-eligible he had to abandon his college eligibility and leave Texas Tech, moving the drama to the NFL.
But no one expects this to end the growing crisis caused by sports gambling. College athletes are kids and, as the pandemic of sports betting ensnares teenage boys and young men, it is bringing down the integrity of sports with them.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.
These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.
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