Texas Republican Ken Paxton has often worn the black hat in his scandal-plagued extremist political career. But as I explained at New York, he may have picked the wrong cause at the worst possible time.
As any college-football fan can tell you, the sport is in the midst of all sorts of revolutionary changes. Federal courts have steadily eroded the old system treating college athletes as amateurs bound to one school and governed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Players in all the major college sports are being openly paid (some of them so much that they are delaying entry into the professional leagues) and have won virtually unlimited transfer rights. Football, by far the biggest revenue generator for college athletics, is now governed less by the NCAA than by teams and the sprawling conferences to which they belong and the media networks paying for the whole show.
But in this time of college-football iconoclasm, there are a few things still considered holy. Chief among them are norms deemed essential to “the integrity of the game,” which is code for the fair competition between teams that is supposed to go on no matter how much off-field chaos surrounds it. And that’s why, for all the mockery the NCAA draws these days as a toothless tiger in a dangerous jungle, people in the sport totally lined up behind its decision to ban participation in the 2026 season by Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby, who got caught doing some pretty heavy sports gambling, including the biggest no-no of all: gambling on his own team’s games (actually a couple of transfers earlier, when Sorsby was at Indiana). There was a general sense that if the NCAA couldn’t enforce that norm, the sport would collapse from a general loss of faith in the central myth of young athletes giving their very best in fair competition.
And so when a state judge in Texas intervened to slap a temporary injunction on NCAA sanctions against Sorsby, which effectively guaranteed he’d get to play for Texas Tech in 2026 while his case was litigated (earning, according to most reports, several million dollars), the reaction was intense, as ESPN reported:“The reaction around college sports was nearly unanimous, with the idea of Sorsby playing in 2026 after admitting to thousands of bets on sports — including 40 on his own team — representing the latest crossroads for an industry that has faced a dizzying number of them in recent years.“ACC commissioner Jim Phillips told ESPN the ruling represents a ‘horrendous pattern’ that is ‘eroding the integrity of our process.’ A Big 12 athletic director told ESPN that they are ‘disgusted’ and added: ‘We officially lost our soul.’ TCU coach Sonny Dykes told ESPN: ‘How is anyone ever going to trust the outcome of a game again?’”
Texas Tech, expected to be a National Championship contender this year (in no small part because of heavy spending on players financed by billionaire donor Cody Campbell), chose to play the outlaw in the unfolding drama. The school argued that Sorsby was an addict undergoing treatment for his gambling habit and pointed out that he had never, so far as anyone knew, gambled on a game in which he was playing. It also offered to bench him for two early games as a slap on the wrist.
As Texas Tech’s own Big 12 conference discussed sanctions on the player and the program, the school suddenly drew one ferocious ally: Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, who is also the Republican nominee in a red-hot U.S. Senate race. Paxton jumped into the fray with spurs flashing, as Bloomberg Law explains:
“The Big 12 Conference and its schools were threatened with $200 million in damages by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) if they move to sanction Texas Tech over the participation of star quarterback Brendan Sorsby this season.
“Any sanction against Texas Tech for acting consistent with a court’s injunction that reinstated Sorsby’s eligibility on June 8 would violate state and federal antitrust laws, Paxton said in a letter to Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark and board of directors chair Douglas Girod.
“Additionally, any sanction that results in a change to Texas Tech’s scheduled games through cancellations would constitute a breach of the Big 12’s contract with the school, Paxton said. Such an action could also unlawfully interfere with the school’s sponsorship arrangements, ticket sale commitments, alumni contributions, and other commercial relationships, the letter said.”
You can argue that Paxton felt some responsibility to defend a Texas judge’s order against out-of-state interlopers. But still, he could have easily stayed out of it until some actual sanction was imposed instead of threatening Tech’s critics preemptively.
Legal arguments aside, the political risk looks formidable. Sure, the Red Raider fan base (which probably overlaps with Paxton’s ultra-MAGA following to some extent) will be thrilled. But as FootballScoop observed, some of the Big 12 programs Paxton is threatening are also located in the very football-mad state: “Tech now has the state’s chief law enforcement officer on its side in [its] presumptive fight; one must wonder how that’s going over on the campuses of Baylor, Houston and TCU, whom Paxton also represents.”
You also have to wonder if Paxton is troubled by the borderline-woke arguments Texas Tech is making about Sorsby needing to be left alone with his millions so that he can get along with his gambling-addiction treatment.
All in all, it’s quite the gamble Paxton is taking at a time when he’s in a very tough contest with squeaky-clean Democrat James Talarico. Maybe the scandal-plagued Paxton is happy to wear the black hat consistently as the scourge of hypocritical rules-observing elites in politics and now sports. Perhaps he expects a very nice thank-you check to his cash-strapped campaign from Cody Campbell, a heavy contributor to other Texas Republicans. But as the Sorsby saga unfolds in the fall not long before Election Day, he may discover he’s bet on the wrong bettor.
