If you haven’t heard the news, former Indiana, Cincinnati and now Texas Tech quarterback Bredan Sorsby has applied for the 2026 supplemental draft. Sorsby (and Tech) was previously fighting to remain eligible to play college football this year after the NCAA attempted to ban him from the sport after it was revealed that he had previously placed bets on the Hoosiers to win football games when he was the team’s backup quarterback.
Now, there are a couple of questions that need to be answered about his
situation moving forward.
The NFL has taken in players who have done this in the past. One example is Hunter Dekkers, who was signed to the New Orleans Saints last offseason as a college free agent. Like Sorsby, Dekkers bet on his team, Iowa State, when he was a backup quarterback. The NCAA banned him, leading to Dekkers dropping down to the JuCo level for a year before going the professional route.
What’s up in the air, though, is whether the NFL will allow Sorsby to enter the supplemental draft. Because the NFL is operating as a pseudo cartel, the league can’t legally ban a player before he ever steps foot in the league. Roger Goodell is going to have to put the decision on whether Sorsby is going to be an NFL player or not in the hands of general managers and owners across the league, eventually. It’s almost entirely up to the discretion of Goodell to decide whether or not a player should be included in the potential pool of supplemental draft prospects, though, so Goodell telling Sorsby that he’ll just need to be a member of the 2027 draft class and sit out this fall is completely on the table.
Even if he is made eligible for the supplemental draft, the next question is going to be how long Sorsby will be suspended by the league, or if he’s suspended at all. In the past, Roger Goodell upheld the five-game suspension in the NFL that supplementary draft choice Terrelle Pryor was supposed to serve at the college level. Will it be a couple of games? Will it be Sorsby’s rookie season? Will there be no suspension at all? It’s all speculation at this point.
What is known is that Sorsby does have legitimate NFL talent. Going into the 2026 draft cycle, Sorsby was consistently ranked as a top-100 selection, with the upside of potentially rising into the first round due to the weakness at the quarterback position in the class. Instead of declaring early, though, Sorsby returned to college and transferred from Cincinnati to Tech. He was generally considered to be the number one player in the transfer portal at his position this offseason.
For those unaware of how the supplemental draft works, it’s a blind bid and teams bid an original draft choice from the 2027 draft that would essentially be consumed if they were awarded Sorsby as the highest bidder. If multiple teams place the highest bid, in terms of the round of draft pick they’d be willing to sacrifice, it would come down to a lottery draft order on who would receive the player. Teams are tiered into three groups: teams that lost six or fewer games the year prior, the remaining non-playoff teams and the playoff teams. Each of those three tiers essentially has its own draft lottery to determine the #1 to #32 order in each round for the supplemental draft.
From a Green Bay Packers perspective, the supplemental draft bidding being limited to only original draft choices limits them somewhat. The Packers won’t be able to bid a first-round pick, due to the Micah Parsons trade, but they also wouldn’t be able to bid a sixth-round pick, due to the Darian Kinnard trade.
The Packers haven’t quite solidified their backup quarterback position, considering the fact that they gave 36-year-old Tyrod Taylor a very modest one-year contract for a veteran QB2, and only did so after the 2026 draft concluded. On paper, Green Bay has a pretty low commitment to their backup quarterback position, both short-term and long-term, which has led some Packers fans to wonder whether the team will be in the mix for Sorsby.
What do you think? Voice your opinion in the comments section.
Join the conversation!
Sign up for a user account and get:
- Fewer ads
- Create community posts
- Comment on articles, community posts
- Rec comments, community posts
- New, improved notifications system!
