Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire is done waiting on a quarterback who was never going to suit up. After months of back-and-forth over whether Brendan Sorsby could get eligible for the 2026 season, McGuire confirmed that Sorsby will instead focus on the NFL Draft — training in Dallas with his family while staying loosely connected to the program.
“Just chatted with Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire, who tells NBC Sports that Brendan Sorsby will spend a majority of his time training for the NFL Draft in Dallas with his family but will come back to Tech to visit his girlfriend (and) the football program whenever he wants,” NBC college football reporter Nicole Auerbach posted to X, formerly Twitter.
Translation: Sorsby is done as a Red Raider before he ever really started.
A wild spring that kept getting weirder
Sorsby was supposed to be the guy. He transferred in, went through the eligibility mess, and then flipped to explore NFL options. That didn’t work out either — the supplemental draft door closed, so now he’s sitting out the entire 2026 season and aiming for the 2027 NFL Draft. The whole thing has been a slow-motion mess for a program that thought it had found its next quarterback.
And it gets messier when you remember the betting scandal. Sorsby was at the center of a gambling investigation in college football and admitted to placing bets on his own team’s games. That alone would have made his 2026 eligibility a longshot, but the NCAA eligibility clock ran out of answers before McGuire could find one.
McGuire didn’t hide that the whole episode stung. He told Auerbach the backlash to the Sorsby ruling was “really tough” to experience, especially the pointed comments from athletic directors across the country. A lot of other coaches reached out to check on him, which tells you how unusual this situation really was.
What Texas Tech does next
The Red Raiders aren’t exactly in crisis mode. They’re coming off a 2025 season that ended with a College Football Playoff appearance under McGuire. That’s real success. But now they have to find a starting quarterback without the guy they built the spring around.
Texas Tech opens the 2026 season on September 5 against Abilene Christian. That’s a home game, and it’s winnable. But the roster doesn’t have an obvious replacement sitting in the quarterback room. McGuire will likely hit the transfer portal again, or look at a younger option internally. Either way, the plan they had for Sorsby is dead.
Sorsby will spend the year training, visiting his girlfriend at Tech, and hoping NFL scouts forget about the gambling stuff by the time the 2027 draft rolls around. That’s a lot of uncertainty for a guy who was supposed to be the face of a playoff team.
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