Sports gambling scandals are nothing new to college athletics. 

There was “The Brooklyn Five” in 1945, the CCNY point-shaving scandal in 1949-50, where players at the City College of New York were manipulating point spreads in exchange for mob bribes. There was the 1979 Boston College case involving famous mobster Henry Hill. Toledo football and basketball were popped for transgressions from 2004-06. 

More recently, quarterback Hunter Dekkers was among two dozen players and staffers at Iowa State and Iowa who were suspended for gambling violations. 

But the Brendan Sorsby saga feels different, at least in the college football space. Most of the point-shaving scandals in college athletics happened in basketball. Football is a tougher sport to fix. 

The hope was that more money in the players’ pockets would leave them less vulnerable to outside actors who could entice them to shave points or fix games with the promise of a couple of thousand dollars. Why risk your eligibility for five grand if the school is already paying you 50 grand to play? 

But it is another item in our pockets that makes the Sorsby situation feel different: Cell phones. For a college student 20 years ago, betting on sports was a process. You needed a bookie or a proxy located in Vegas or Atlantic City. How many 20-year-olds knew how to find those? Now? Simply open your phone and put 20 clams on whatever catches your fancy. 

Sorsby wasn’t the first player to be embroiled in sports wagering, and he surely won’t be the last. Placing bets has become too easy and the players now have some disposable income to throw at the sportsbook.

“We do a ton of education but that needs to be ramped up (across college sports) because, sadly, we’re going to see more of this,” Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire told me at Big 12 media days. “More and more are going to come out. Through this, I’ve heard from so many students and parents of students about how prevalent it is on campuses and how often it happens because it is on phones.”

Turn on a sporting event or queue up your favorite podcast, and a promo code to a gambling website will be hurled into your face within 15 minutes. The advertisements are unavoidable, even in states like Texas where sports wagering mostly remains illegal. 

Sports gambling is no longer taboo. Poker became mainstream in the 2000s because it was aired on ESPN. Sports gambling has experienced a similar rise from the shadows this decade. The NCAA released a survey in 2023 suggesting that 67 percent of students living on campus are bettors. That number has surely grown over the last three years. 

These things are no longer only discussed in back alleys or in shady bars or by Brent Musburger. Bets are now placed with ease from class and dorms and the dining halls.  

“The athletes are mixed in with the regular student body and those guys are gambling all the time and talking about it,” TCU head coach Sonny Dykes said. “But our student athletes can’t be involved, and that’s hard for those guys to have the discipline to stay away from it, but they have to, they have to find a way.”

The players I spoke to at Big 12 media days didn’t seem as concerned as the coaches. Gambling exists, sure, but inside the locker room those bets are on video games or dominos or card games. They say the schools do a good job of providing resources and speakers who discuss the dangers of sports gambling, and that any player who gets involved does so knowing that it is against the rules. 

“You don’t hear much about it, honestly,” Baylor tight end Matthew Klopfenstein said. “We have guys come in and talk to us about the dangers and what to do and what not to do. It’s important for us players to listen closely and realize how damaging it can be for our careers. 

“It can be challenging as a student-athlete because there are ads everywhere and it is pumped out to the public. But thank goodness it is not something we’ve had to deal with at Baylor and it is not something I hear about in the locker room.”

The Sorsby situation has provided coaches and schools a real-life example of the consequences. Sorsby lost millions of dollars, his college eligibility, and the opportunity to enter the 2026 NFL Supplemental draft because of his bets, which were placed at three different schools. 

Most of the players I spoke to put the onus on the locker room, and not the institution. It won’t be the speakers or the administration or even the coaches who can best steer a potential gambler away from ruining their college eligibility. The best deterrent are other teammates. 

“I feel like everybody watches out for each other on that because we see now how serious it can be and what it can cost. It’s really as serious as it can get,” Houston safety Kentrell Webb said. “You can lose the opportunity to play this sport for good. If anyone was thinking about it, this was a clear example of the consequences.”