CINCINNATI — A potential plot line to the Texas Tech football game at Cincinnati went out the window this summer when the Red Raiders parted ways with Brendan Sorsby over his acknowledged violations of NCAA rules against gambling.
A newly released document shows Tech hired a New York-based strategic-communications firm to assist in its handling of the matter.
FGS Global billed the Tech athletics department $260,952.50 in an invoice dated June 23 with a July 23 due date. According to the invoice, the amount was the sum of hourly fees for its work in May and June. Tech provided the document this week in response to an Avalanche-Journal public-records request for names and amounts Tech paid or owed to any outside public-relations personnel it retained
in the matter.
"I think it was a collective idea," Tech senior associate athletics director Robert Giovannetti said Saturday, Oct. 24. "When something has that national attention to it, we discussed it as a group, obviously, with the president's office, the [Texas Tech University] System office, that it would be useful for us to bring in a company that's familiar with dealing with this type of a situation."
The A-J sent the open-records request on July 9. Tech sought an open-records decision from the state attorney general's office in case a third party objected to the disclosure of potential proprietary information.
On Sept. 28, assistant attorney general Amy Shipp responded to Tech that the office had "not received comments from the third party explaining why the submitted information should not be released. Therefore, we have no basis to conclude any third party has a protected proprietary interest in the submitted information."
Texas Tech University System Board of Regents Chairman Cody Campbell, in a three-page letter on June 15, announced that Sorsby would not play for the Red Raiders this season.
Giovannetti said Tech officials stayed in close contact with FGS Global, usually by phone and sometimes by Zoom, "during the height of when all this was happening."
"They were great to work with," he said. "We met with them. We had a regularly scheduled meeting with them every day, and then they were always available, too, on calls if we had questions or things we wanted to bring up."
Sorsby transferred to Tech after he was the starting quarterback for Cincinnati the past two years. He is sitting out this season after the NFL rejected his petition for a supplemental draft.
The No. 8 Red Raiders (6-0, 3-0 in the Big 12) play the Bearcats (4-2, 1-2) at 11 a.m. CDT Saturday, Oct. 24, at Nippert Stadium.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Here's how much Texas Tech paid PR firm in Brendan Sorsby matter
