Sports

The NCAA Rule That Could Have Saved Sorsby Just Changed

By Curtis Jones · May 1, 2026

Five days after Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby entered residential treatment for a gambling addiction — and while the NCAA is still investigating thousands of bets he allegedly placed on college sports — the NCAA quietly settled a lawsuit that would have changed the conditions that surrounded his case.

The settlement, reached Tuesday and reported Wednesday, eliminates the NCAA’s longstanding prohibition on athletes accepting prize money from competitions before they enroll in college. The case was brought by Reese Brantmeier, the North Carolina women’s tennis champion who won the NCAA singles title in November 2025, and former Texas tennis player Maya Joint. Under the settlement, the NCAA agreed to pay $2.02 million in damages to the two plaintiffs and more than $2 million in attorneys’ fees — and more significantly, changed its rules to allow athletes in every sport to earn prize money from competitions before setting foot on a college campus.

The connection to Sorsby is not incidental. It is direct.

Sorsby was a highly recruited junior tennis player before becoming a college quarterback. Under the rules that existed until this week, any prize money he earned in tennis tournaments before enrolling at Indiana would have put his college athletic eligibility at risk. The financial restrictions that the NCAA imposed on elite junior athletes — in the name of protecting amateurism — left young players in a structural bind: they could generate revenue for tournament organizers, equipment brands, and streaming services, but they could not keep the money they earned.

The NCAA’s NIL rules, which began in 2021, helped address some of this — allowing college athletes to profit from their name, image, and likeness. But they did not address what happened before enrollment. A 17-year-old tennis prodigy who won $50,000 in a junior grand slam tournament had to choose between keeping the money and playing college tennis.

Sorsby’s gambling, according to investigators, included placing thousands of bets through a sports wagering app — behavior he has now characterized as an addiction that began during his college career. Whether the financial constraints imposed by NCAA amateurism rules contributed to the conditions in which that addiction developed is a question without a clean answer. What is clear is that the rule being settled this week treated pre-college prize money as a threat to athletic purity — and that position is now gone.

The settlement applies to all sports, not just tennis. It means that a 16-year-old golfer who earns prize money at a junior invitational, a 17-year-old swimmer who places in an international competition, or a high school track athlete who wins a road race can now accept those earnings without jeopardizing their future college eligibility.

Brantmeier, who filed the original complaint in March 2024 on antitrust grounds under the Sherman Act, called the outcome a step toward treating college athletes as what they are.

“Athletes deserve to be compensated for their work,” she said in a statement. “This is a step in the right direction.”

The Sorsby investigation continues. The NCAA has not announced a timeline for its eligibility ruling. His attorney has not indicated when or whether he will return to Texas Tech’s roster. The rule change came too late for him — but not for the next Brendan Sorsby.