Brendan Sorsby has a year to rewrite his story ... but he needs to stop playing the victim
So ex-college quarterback Brendan Sorsby suddenly finds himself with a year off, an unexpected interlude between the rigors of college and the pressures of a real job. Many recent college students, given this kind of gap year opportunity, will go backpacking across Europe or work a ski lift or sit in a lifeguard chair. Anything to stave off the real world a few months longer.
Sorsby probably won't be staying in any Italian youth hostels or carving up ski slopes. But then, he's got a much larger opportunity awaiting him than most gap-year ex-students … as long as he takes advantage of it.
Sorsby, of course, isn't taking this career siesta by choice. Thanks to his incredibly foolish gambling habits, he went from leader of a College Football Playoff-level program to pariah faster than you can say three-team parlay. He's got no one to blame but himself, even though he and his team have tried to rope in the University of Cincinnati, Texas Tech, the NCAA, the gambling-industrial complex, the NFL, and probably even the Vatican too, just to muddy the waters.
But that's the past, and we're not here to re-litigate the past. (Not even with a Texas judge.) No, let's discuss Brendan Sorsby's future, specifically the next 10 months of that future. Between now and the 2027 NFL Draft, Sorsby has a unique opportunity, a chance to completely rewrite the narrative that's grown up around him, a narrative he and his lawyers have fed with heaping doses of fertilizer.
Sorsby gambled his way out of a starting job for one of the elite college programs in the country, and with it a potential gateway to the first round of the NFL Draft. And for what? A few taps on an app, a few winners, a lot more losers. That's how quickly you can gamble away what could have been a Heisman-level year, and that's the kind of story Sorsby ought to be telling right now to every college student, every rookie in every league, everyone who's used a promo code to get free bets and believed they were on the way to riches.
You want a scared-straight story? "I gambled my way out of a guaranteed $5 million, don't be like me" is a pretty terrifying pitch.
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