If you follow college football, or even if you follow sports in general, you’ve probably at least caught a little bit of news about what’s going on with Brendan Sorsby. If not, here’s the quick and dirty of it. Sorsby is (was) at Texas Tech for his upcoming senior season after two years apiece at Indiana and Cincinnati. However, a couple of months ago, it came out that Sorsby had checked himself into rehab for a sports gambling addiction. His betting included tens of thousands worth of bets on his own
teams. He was obviously ruled ineligible because that’s like the biggest no-no there is when it comes to betting on sports. He still tried to appeal the decision but was denied. Texas Tech tried to do the same but were also denied. They then took it to court, where a Texas judge said that actually the NCAA can’t punish him like that. The NCAA appealed that decision, but no word on how that was going.
All of that snip snap snip snap of Sorsby’s eligibility got the rest of the college football world up in arms. Nebraska and Georgia officially banned scheduling future games against Texas Tech, while a number of other schools were reportedly considering doing the same. Texas Tech’s own conference, the Big 12, filed a lawsuit in attempt to get court backing to enforce rules suspending Sorsby.
All of that was rendered moot when Sorsby announced he was going to apply for the NFL Supplemental Draft.
Now, what is the supplemental draft, and why should the Panthers partake? In short, it is an ad hoc pseudo-draft that takes place when one or more players have extenuating circumstances that prevent them from playing college football after the current year’s draft is complete. It’s become increasingly rare in recent years having last occurred in 2019. The supplemental draft essentially functions like waivers. Teams are ordered based on a lottery system then get to blindly bid a draft pick for a given player. The team with the highest draft pick bid gets the player and forfeits the corresponding pick in the following year’s draft.
Now, this is about the Panthers, and why they should make a bid for Sorsby. Sorsby was widely regarded as one of the better prospects in this past draft class, and might have been on par with Ty Simpson had he stayed in the draft. Depending on how the upcoming season went, many saw Sorsby as a first or second round pick. However, teams are not likely to bid picks of such high value in a supplemental draft when they don’t know where they’ll be picking next year.
The Panthers have two fourth round picks in 2027, their own and the Vikings’. They should bid the better of those two picks to try to land Sorsby. On paper, the team looks significantly better than the group that won eight games and the NFC South last season. One of the biggest question marks about the team’s long term viability is exactly what they have at quarterback. While Young has shown improvement, he’s still not all that great a starting quarterback. The Panthers have a chance to use a fourth round pick on a possible Day 1 talent to add competition to the room. Sorsby has good size, a very strong arm, and very good mobility. He has all the physical traits you’d want in a quarterback, he just needs to clean up some decision making on and off the field. If he does that, the Panthers could have found themselves a better long term option at quarterback at a very low cost.
