Ron Slavin responds to notion that Brendan Sorsby has escaped punishment

There’s a vague notion percolating in some league circles that, by entering the supplemental draft after losing his NCAA eligibility for 2026, quarterback Brendan Sorsby has somehow avoided punishment for underage gambling and betting on his own team at Indiana. If the powers-that-be on 345 Park Avenue feel the same way, it could either keep Sorsby out of the supplemental draft or spark a Terrelle Pryor-style suspension after Sorsby is picked.

In a Monday appearance on #PFTPM, agent Ron Slavin was asked to respond to the claim that Sorsby has suffered no punishment as a result of his behavior.

“He definitely didn’t escape punishment,” Slavin said. “The fact that in January, he could have made the decision to go to the draft. We had a General Manager call us on New Year’s Eve and say, ‘Are you really going back to school?’ He made the decision to go back to school because he wanted, the whole ‘more than 25 and 35 starts on the success rate of quarterbacks.’ That was in his mind.

“He really wanted to come back to Texas, where he was born and raised. He wanted to go to [Texas] Tech and keep building on what they had already built last year. He wanted to win a national championship. He wanted to win a Heisman Trophy. The monetary dollars that he lost here because of this situation is astronomical.

“He spent all his own money on these attorneys to fight for him. He went through a process. And the way that he’s been ridiculed in the media and crushed for something that he did again at 18 years old, if that’s not a harsh enough punishment in the day and age where everybody’s talked about 24/7, and everyone has an opinion, and nobody has to be fact-checked anymore. I mean, I think the kid’s faced a lot, and he was punished pretty heavily.”

As Slavin also noted, many of the people who have been wagging a finger at Sorsby for falling victim to the omnipresent ads for sports betting did so on shows that are sponsored by sportsbooks. The irony has been lost on most who have passed judgment on Sorsby without the benefit of knowing the whole story — or without undertaking an effort to learn more about what Sorsby did, and didn’t, do and why he (and thousands of other young men who are subject to non-stop gambling ads) did what he did.

Some are making the leap in logic that betting on Indiana while on the Indiana roster but not playing means Sorsby potentially will throw games or shave points in the NFL. Slavin addressed that, too.

“He’s a competitor,” Slavin said. “He wants to win. And even dating back to Indiana, what he did was bet on his teammates to do good, to win, to succeed. And now with what he’s got going, and I know where his mindset is, he wants to prove everybody wrong moving forward. There’s nothing more that Brendan Sorsby’d love to do than go to the NFL, and be a Hall of Fame quarterback, and let everybody know that, you know, he’s a 10-year starter, won a bunch of football games, and all this is in the past. Again, something that happened when he was 18 years old.”

At this point, the overriding question is whether he’ll embark on his NFL career in 2026 via the supplemental draft, or whether he’ll be in the 2027 draft pool — without having the opportunity to play football anywhere in 2026.

Click here to read article