Reflections on Sorsby

For the month of June I cannot get away from Brendan Sorsby, and the man who finally helped me understand the magnitude of the situation has been dead since 2007.

You have to start with how good he was, because the story does not work otherwise. Sorsby is a real quarterback. A starter at Indiana, a starter at Cincinnati, and last winter the prize of the transfer portal, the kind of player a program builds a season around. Texas Tech, fresh off its first Big 12 championship, reportedly moved something like five million dollars in name-image-and-likeness money to bring him to Lubbock on a one-year deal. He was not a cautionary tale. He was the centerpiece.

Then the house started burning. An NCAA investigation, opened this spring on a tip a sportsbook had routed through federal law enforcement, found that Sorsby had placed at least 2,900 bets, more than thirty thousand dollars' worth during his two years at Indiana alone, part of roughly ninety thousand dollars wagered across his college career, including more than forty bets on his own Indiana team while he wore its uniform. In Texas, where sports betting is illegal, he wired money to people in other states to place the bets for him. The NCAA ruled him permanently ineligible. By every ordinary measure of how these things end, that should have been the end.

It was not. On June 8 a visiting Lubbock judge named Ken Curry granted Sorsby a temporary injunction ordering the NCAA to make him eligible, on the condition that he stay in treatment and sit out the season's first two games. The NCAA appealed before dinner. Then the whole thing detonated. Georgia announced it would not play Texas Tech in any sport, in any season, until further notice; Nebraska said the same the same afternoon; Michigan scratched a volleyball match. The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, sent the Big 12 a letter threatening to sue the conference for some two hundred million dollars if it dared discipline one of its own schools. So the Big 12 sued first, a forty-seven-page federal complaint filed in the dark in a Dallas courthouse against Texas Tech, its chancellor, its president, its athletic director, and the attorney general of Texas. A conference hauled its own reigning champion into court to stop it from playing a quarterback.

While all of that hung in the air, the adults in Lubbock formed a chorus. Head coach Joey McGuire told a luncheon crowd that the thing uniting the country against his program was strange, because "it's not murder, it's not beating somebody." Cody Campbell, the billionaire chairman of the Texas Tech University System Board of Regents, and a longtime political donor to Paxton, went on Dan Dakich's show and explained that since the kid was eligible, the school did not "have a whole lot of choice but to play him." And athletic director Kirby Hocutt posted a statement announcing that the university's role had been to support the young man's recovery, "not to engineer his eligibility."

Somewhere in the middle of all that noise, a line I had not thought about in twenty years floated up off a dusty shelf in the back of my head.

It took me a moment to place it. Cat's Cradle. Vonnegut. I read it at West Point, in whatever sliver of time that place leaves for reading what nobody assigns, and the Army made me return the copy before I had finished thinking about it. For the uninitiated it is a short, strange, perfect book, a made-up religion whose scripture warns you on the first page that all of it is a lie, and a substance called ice-nine that I will come to, because ice-nine turns out to be the cleanest explanation of the athletic director profession I have ever found. But the line that surfaced first is about the string game. A cat's cradle is a web of X's strung between two hands. A grown-up loops the string and holds it up, and a child looks and looks and looks, hunting the animal the name promised. There is no cat. There is no cradle. There is a pattern of string, and a small person who badly wants it to add up to something warm.

That is the modern athletic director's job, the whole strung-up shape of it. Look at the X's. Coaching trees, Title IX compliance, donor stewardship, game-day operations, a budget born in August that dies at a bowl game. Search committees stare at that web the way the child stares at the string, certain something living must be inside it. Look and look and look. Nowhere in it, not in a single X, is there a thread that produces a dollar on the Saturdays the team loses.

Vonnegut would have had a word for the thing wrapped around all of it. He invented a whole vocabulary for the made-up religion at the center of the novel, and its sharpest coinage is granfalloon: a proud association of human beings that is not, underneath the pride, a team at all. A false karass. His own example, Indianapolis man that he was, was Hoosiers. I have looked for a graceful way to write the next sentence and there is not one. Brendan Sorsby placed more than forty bets on a granfalloon.

The granfalloon that interests me is bigger than one quarterback. It is the athletic director carousel itself. More than two hundred universities have run their searches through firms since 2008, and the data says what your eyes already told you: a firm-led search is nearly twice as likely to hand back a candidate recycled out of some other FBS department. When athletic directors retire, they reappear as search-firm consultants, so the people choosing the next generation of athletic directors are the last generation of athletic directors. A proud and meaningless association of human beings, photocopying itself, and calling the copy a team.

A granfalloon is what you get when you mistake the boundary for the bond, the conference logo, the directors' cup standings, the alumni email list. The real teams in this business do not respect any of those edges. Vonnegut would have called them a karass: a group quietly doing real work together without ever quite realizing they are a unit, impossible to draw on an org chart. The architect, the bond counsel, the operator who runs the district, the family office that owns the ground, the city that rezoned it. That is the team that actually moves money, and like every karass it turns around an object, a wampeter. In this business the wampeter is not a trophy. It is the land.

Which brings me to ice-nine.

In the novel a scientist invents a new crystalline form of water as a favor to the Marines, who are tired of fighting in mud. Ice-nine is a seed crystal. Any water it touches learns to freeze the same way, instantly, at room temperature, and a single chip is enough. The scientist thinks he has solved mud. He has actually ended the world, because water does not stay where you put it.

The search-firm playbook is ice-nine for athletic departments. Drop one sitting FBS director into a new building and the building freezes into the same crystal as the last one, the same flinch when the portal opens, the same buyout arithmetic, the same prayer that one more banner will cover everything underneath it.

You can put a price on the freeze. Texas A&M paid Jimbo Fisher about seventy-seven million dollars to stop coaching, with no offset if he ever coached again. It is the most money this country has ever paid a man to not do a thing. LSU paid roughly fifty-four million to move on from Brian Kelly and tried to wriggle out of it until its own president confirmed, in writing, that every dollar was owed. In Utah this spring the state auditor watched an athletic department's reserves drop from $61.5 million to a projected $5.8 million in two years and noted, in the flat language of auditors, "no observable plan to decrease spending."

And the bill is still climbing. The House settlement now lets schools pay players directly, $20.5 million a year to start, a cap engineered to rise toward thirty-three million by 2034, with a half-dozen rosters already reported north of forty million once the outside money is counted. Every department in America just woke up with a forty-million-dollar cost of goods sold and a leader trained to run a parking lot. Busy, busy, busy, is what a Bokononist murmurs at machinery this complicated and this doomed. The water is moving. The playbook keeps teaching it to freeze.

Athletic directors are not villains. One at a time they are among the most impressive operators I meet, relentless fundraisers, fluent diplomats, masters of a compliance regime that would hospitalize a normal executive. Their skill set was the correct answer to the world that built it. The trouble is that the world ended, formally, the afternoon the House settlement turned every department into a business with a forty-million-dollar cost of goods sold. Which leaves me somewhere uncomfortable: the modern athletic director is the wrong person to run modern college athletics.

The job is built on a five-year contract and the assets now demand a thirty-year mind. A man who knows he is gone in five will trade the decade for the season every time. Vonnegut slipped a little calypso into the early pages that reads like a performance review for the whole profession. Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; man got to sit and wonder why. Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; man got to tell himself he understand.

The profession even keeps its own scripture of comforting lies. The next media deal fixes it. The banner pays for itself. We will address spending after the season. Vonnegut called these foma, harmless untruths, and his counsel was to choose the ones that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy, and live by those. The athletic director's foma make him none of those things. They mostly make him employed somewhere else by the time the consequences are clear.

So here is what I would do instead, and you already know where this is going, because everything here eventually arrives in the same place. The ground.

Hire the developer. Not as a consultant, not as a board adviser. As the athletic director. The real estate operator carries the exact inventory the moment demands: revenue that arrives whether the team wins or not, mixed-use ground around the stadium instead of forty acres of parking that earn money seven Saturdays a year, reserves built on purpose for the turnover everyone knows is coming, fluency with the private capital that will finance the next stadium district when donor checks no longer can. And above all the time horizon, twenty and thirty years out, because that is how long ground takes, and ground does not transfer to the SEC for a better media package.

The discipline behind it is almost embarrassingly simple, a duprass, Vonnegut's word for a karass of exactly two that does its quiet work and lets nobody else in. The team is the operating company. The land is the property company. The whole art is making them feed each other on purpose. A modest district throwing off a few million a year in lease income is a buyout reserve and a portal reserve and a revenue-share check that never once looks at the scoreboard first. The Battery figured this out years ago. The district drinks whether the team is wonderful or dreadful. The current model is helmet-to-helmet dependent on winning. Only one of these two religions keeps a balance sheet.

None of this means firing every athletic director in America. The developer has his own blind spots, he chases yield, not banners, and he lacks the institutional fluency a good administrator spends twenty years acquiring. The owner's mind is a discipline, not a bloodline; the chair acquires it by hiring it or by growing it. What it can no longer do is go without.

Run Sorsby back through the owner's eyes and you can watch the two religions separate in real time. There were always two questions tangled together in Lubbock, and the traditional model could not tell them apart.

The first is human, and it is not complicated. Brendan Sorsby is twenty-one years old. He was born in January of 2004, which means he was barely out of his teens the autumn he sat in a dorm at Indiana and put more than forty bets on the team he played for, a kid pulling the lever on his own Saturdays. A young man with a diagnosed gambling disorder deserves treatment and recovery, full stop.

The second question is colder, and it is the one nobody in that building would say out loud. Who absorbs the integrity risk while he plays, and what is it worth? The Lubbock chorus collapsed both questions into a single word, eligible, as if a court order were a business plan. But an owner knows the precise reach of a judge. A judge can make a player eligible. A judge cannot make Georgia schedule you, and Georgia, with Nebraska right behind it, had already put that in writing the day of the ruling. A judge cannot make a sponsor renew, a recruit commit, or a family buy four seats to watch a quarterback the entire country is arguing about. Everyone in that building was staring at the injunction, looking and looking and looking at the X's.

And then, between the week I started writing this and the week I finished it, the cat failed to appear.

On the fifteenth of June, the same Monday the Big 12 filed its complaint, Texas Tech blinked. Cody Campbell announced that Sorsby would not be a Red Raider after all. His lawyers withdrew the suit, which dropped him straight back into ineligibility, and the roughly five million dollars the school had committed to him went where committed money goes, out the door, for a quarterback who would never take a snap. Facing a deadline to enter the NFL's supplemental draft, he applied, and on June 23 the league declined to hold one at all, leaving its only applicant with no professional door open until 2027 at the earliest. A permanent ineligibility ruling, a temporary injunction, a state attorney general, a conference suing its own champion, a national boycott, and five million dollars, and the box score reads zero attempts, zero yards. He was made eligible. He was never made worth it.

Which brings me, at last, to Corvallis, and I mean that literally. The injunction had cleared Sorsby to play in 2026 on the condition that he sit the first two games, and the second game on Texas Tech's schedule is at Oregon State. The calendar had Brendan Sorsby walking into Reser Stadium in week two for his season debut. Instead he walked out of the sport before week one. Peculiar travel suggestions, Bokonon says, are dancing lessons from God.

Oregon State, my Oregon State, the program my father handed me the way other fathers hand down a watch, just made two hires that have kept me insufferable for weeks. The football program brought in JaMarcus Shephard, fresh off a run as assistant head coach and co-offensive coordinator at Alabama, for his first head job anywhere. And the university named Kevin Griffin its athletic director, out of Ohio State, where he ran brand, business strategy, and partnerships for the closest thing college sports has to a real franchise office. If Corvallis becomes the Alabama of the Pacific Northwest, the title Eugene assumes it already owns, with the operational chops of Columbus, I will coach my son's flag football team, the Beavers, undefeated, with the fervor of a man who has glimpsed the promised land.

What I noticed was better than fan hope. Corvallis did not pull a sitting athletic director off the carousel. Griffin has never run an athletic department anywhere. He was not even on the senior team at Ohio State; he was the associate vice president for brand and partnerships, a man the committee had to look past a title to find. His career runs through D.C. United, the Browns, the Seahawks, and then Ohio State's revenue machine, brand and partnerships and money that arrives for reasons other than winning. He is the nephew of Archie and Ray Griffin, which means the only two-time Heisman winner in history is in the family and the football credibility rides along for free. The fair worry, the one a careful committee would raise out loud, is whether a brand lieutenant was ever in the room for the hardest calls this industry makes. Maybe he wasn't. But I would rather hand the chair to a man who still has to learn the politics than to one who has already forgotten the ground.

And here is where I have to talk myself out of my own applause, because the carousel will insist it already did the brave thing. The trade press has been cataloguing the shift, the Modern AD newsletter chief among them, and the exhibits are real. Stanford handing the chair to the former chief executive of Nike, Notre Dame hiring the man who ran NBC Sports, North Carolina installing a NASCAR team president, Wisconsin courting a fund manager, Miami chasing an executive off the Roc Nation org chart while its president goes on WQAM's Joe Rose Show and describes the future of the department as patches on the jerseys and Adidas and Nike elbowing for room on the sleeve. The firms have discovered the outsider, and they are proud of it. But look hard at what every one of those people was hired to do. Media. Brand. Sponsorship. Rights. The logo. Miami's president has correctly diagnosed that this is a professional model now, and then prescribed, with total confidence, more weather. Every one of them is a weather hire. Not one of them was brought in for the ground.

So when I tell Kevin Griffin to think like an owner, hear me precisely. I do not mean be the first outsider; Corvallis is late to that, not early. I mean be the first to treat the dirt under the stadium as the asset, the wampeter the whole enterprise should turn around, the one holding that keeps compounding after the media deal expires and the patch peels off the sleeve. The first acre matters more than the next banner. Banners hang; ground compounds. Build only a roster and Corvallis gets five good years and a farewell press conference. Build the district, the year-round, mixed-use, lease-paying ground around that stadium, and my grandchildren inherit something no realignment cycle can repossess. You have never been an athletic director before, Kevin. It is the best line on your résumé. Do not start now.

I owe you the obvious disclosure, because you have been thinking it since the words hire the developer. Our organization is the capital behind the developer. I run a team that does this exact thing, an operating company and a property company, the team and the dirt, built to feed each other. When I tell you the future belongs to people who think the way I am paid to think, weigh the interest in it. I have, as honestly as a man can weigh his own reflection, and I still take the ground over the banner, because the ground is the one thing in this entire business that has never lied to me. The AP poll lies. The Coaches poll lies. The portal lies. The injunction lied to a whole state. The cat is always a string. The land is just the land.

I ordered my own copy of Cat's Cradle this week, way too many years after the Army made me give the first one back. There is something fitting in that. The library book was a rental, due on a date someone else picked; the one on my desk now is mine to keep. Bokonon's advice still holds. Choose the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind, and live by them. So here is mine, freely declared. The Beavers are going to do this right, the hire from Columbus is going to think in decades, and the Northwest is going to get its Alabama, with a district humming around the stadium on the days nobody is playing anything at all.

And if the carousel just spins again, if the firms string up the same web of X's and the committees lean in close, certain that this time something lives inside the string, I will be right here, watching with the children. See the cat? See the cradle? There is no damn cat. There is no damn cradle. But the ground underneath the hands is real, and somebody is going to own it.

It ought to be the school.

momentous-sports.com

Not investment advice. From the Desk Of is a personal column produced by Momentous Sports for educational purposes only. It reflects the author's personal views and is not an offer to sell or solicitation to buy securities; any offering by Momentous Sports will be made solely to verified accredited investors under Rule 506(c) of Regulation D and only through formal offering documents. Consult your own advisors. Past performance is not indicative of future results. References to Brendan Sorsby, Texas Tech, the NCAA, the Big 12, the University of Utah, and the coaching and athletic-director hires at Oregon State and elsewhere are drawn from public reporting and are presented as-is with no warranty of accuracy or completeness. Cat's Cradle and its terminology are the work of Kurt Vonnegut, cited here for commentary. Disclosure: Momentous Sports Group actively invests in sports-anchored real estate.

© 2026 Momentous Sports. All rights reserved.