Texas Tech had the chance to become a great success story, but chose to be a victim instead

There is no shortage of thoughts and opinions on what is happening at Texas Tech with Brendan Sorsby. I've certainly shared mine, as has nearly everybody else. If you're reading this, I've no doubt you've shared yours too.

Why wouldn't we? It's a sports controversy that has everything. A player who admitted to betting on college football, including games involving his own team, is now fighting to play college football because a court said he could. The NCAA is once again trying to enforce rules in a world where every rule seems to exist only until somebody finds the right lawyer, the right judge, or the right attorney general willing to make it a campaign issue.

If you could pick one story that would perfectly encapsulate all the issues surrounding college sports right now, and how sports so often do a great job of putting up a mirror to society and culture as a whole, this would be it.

But there's another part of this story that truly bums me out. It's not the most important aspect; it's more of a small tragedy.

Instead of building on what was a truly incredible 2025 season, Texas Tech has decided to go for the heel turn.

What a waste.

Texas Tech releases 21-minute video defending Brendan Sorsby's reinstatement, but questions still remain

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Texas Tech had a chance to be one of the best stories in the sport. Not in the "nice little team had a nice little season" way, either. I mean a real story. A program story. A modern college football story.

This is a sport in which everything has been blown up and rearranged in real time. NIL and the transfer portal changed the sport. The power structure is still recognizable, but it's no longer untouchable. For the first time in a long time, there are programs looking around and realizing they don't have to wait years for the right coach, the right recruiting class and the right alignment of planets. They can invest, be aggressive and matter right now.

Indiana proved that better than anybody. Indiana's title run last year was not supposed to happen. Indiana football was a punchline with a Big Ten logo attached. Then Curt Cignetti showed up, flipped the roster, changed the standard, won immediately, and suddenly one of the sport's most hopeless jobs became the sport's best story. In the blink of an eye, Indiana became a national powerhouse. It became a proof of concept.

And here's the thing, Texas Tech seems to have forgotten: everybody loved it.

Nobody was mad Indiana got good. Nobody looked at Indiana and said, "How dare you enter the room?" People love new blood. College football fans will complain about almost anything because complaining is one of the sport's core traditions, but they do not hate a program crashing the party. There is always room for a team that isn't supposed to be here, as long as it doesn't immediately start acting like it owns the place.

Texas Tech was sitting on a version of that story.

No, Texas Tech is not Indiana. It has more history, more resources, more success, more reason to believe something like this could happen. But it is not Alabama. It is not Georgia. It is not Ohio State. It is not one of the programs the sport has been conditioned to assume will be in the top 10 and fighting for national titles every season.

The school invested and got aggressive. Those decisions paid off quickly, as the Red Raiders won their first Big 12 title and made their first College Football Playoff appearance. Even though the season ended with a loss, it still felt like the beginning of something. That should have been the story.

Texas Tech should have spent this offseason selling that rise. It should have sold the 2025 season as proof that Lubbock can be more than a weird road trip where your season goes to die.

Instead, Texas Tech has chosen to portray itself as a victim of an ecosystem that isn't ready to accept it, as if there was absolutely no other path it could've taken to avoid this controversy of its own making.

Now the Red Raiders are no longer the up-and-comers, but a program hiding behind a court order. They are not proof that ambition can still be rewarded. They are the school asking everybody to believe they are being persecuted because the rest of the Big 12 and college football have the nerve to think betting on your own team should carry consequences.

That's the part I can't get past. The victim act.

Texas Tech isn't being punished because people can't handle its success. Nobody is out to get the Red Raiders because they got too big for their britches. If anything, college football was ready to embrace Tech. The sport needs more teams like last year's Big 12 champions. It needs more programs with money, ambition and a legitimate belief that the top of the sport is not reserved for the same eight helmets every year.

Instead, Texas Tech chose this mess when it didn't have to. It's reached a point where it's releasing 20-minute videos that skirt around the obvious contradictions in its own logic. The school could have said the situation is unfortunate and that Brendan Sorsby needs support. Support that it was ready and more than willing to offer, but the rules are the rules, and the program and sport must be bigger than one player. That's what leadership looks like.

Where the story goes from here, who knows? Maybe Sorsby plays, and maybe Tech has another great season. In college football, as in life, the scoreboard has a way of laundering almost anything if you give it enough time.

But Texas Tech was on the verge of being another great story. Another hero's tale in a sport full of them. Instead, the Raiders believe being a villain is more useful to them, and sometimes the villains win, too.

It's just nobody is happy when they do.