What should the NCAA do about Brendan Sorsby? I asked a gambling writer:

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Today, I’m happy to pass the mic over to my old colleague and friend, Collin Sherwin. Collin is a former college sports industry administrator and a longtime sportswriter, who covers, among other things, gambling.

When I find myself needing to write about the gaming world, or if there’s something in the news that I don’t understand, Collin is one of the first guys I hit up.

Because he has so much more lived and professional experience in this world than I do, I want to give him a chance to share what he thinks about what the NCAA/Texas Tech/Brendan Sorsby story. His thoughts are below:

I worked in college athletics communications for about six years, and spent my last season at Delaware State as an assistant sports information director. I’m going to leave the names out of it, but this was the first year that NFL parlays were allowed in Delaware due to a series of court rulings that exempted the First State from PAPSA regulations on NFL parlay bets.

Sometime around Week 1 of the NFL season, I walk into the end of a men’s basketball practice and see some fellow staff filling out gold parlay sheets from the Dover Downs Casino and NASCAR track across the street. While compliance at an HBCU in the late aughts could generously be described as forgiving, as someone that came from a school with a robust compliance attitude while an undergrad and employee at South Florida, it was a bit of a shock to the system.

Gambling has been a part of college sports since the inception, and despite any protestations of Walter Byers and his successors, it’s a major part of the success of the industry. But if we’re going to deal in reality, some hoops coaches putting down a $100 on the Ravens and Eagles moneylines shouldn’t be a problem. Those coaches would have been on camera while they placed said wagers, leading to a documented trail of their activity. The NCAA doesn’t need to care about these things.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: You don’t even need a name to get down on games anymore. You just need a burner email and some Bitcoin, Ethereum, or another cryptocurrency that’s not Know Your Customer compliant, and to know where to look. While it’s possible your offshore sportsbook of choice could just shut down one day and take all your money, they likely won’t for two reasons:

And this is why the line on Brendan Sorsby needs to be drawn so brightly. Because the real nefarious behavior is so easy to disguise, which is the actual problem. So when someone does get caught breaking the rules, the censure has to be severe enough to be preventive. Even for someone dealing with the illness of compulsive gambling.

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It’s not the end of the world for a scholarship athlete to put $20 down on Hawai’i total points late on a Saturday night. And if this was Sorsby’s only crime, I’d argue he should be able to be under center for the Texas Tech Red Raiders this season.

But Sorsby has admitted to betting on games in which he was eligible to participate (even if he didn’t play), and even if he did so only in support of his team, that has to have consequences. Even more so if he was placing bets through any kind of proxy, including friends or family members. And if any serious level of money was in his name on games in which he participated or had inside information, there should be legal consequences too.

In the past the NCAA has probably been too quick to punish individuals via their oversized regulations manuals about phone calls and bagel spreads. But with gambling, they should be allowed to zealously investigate. You can’t stop sports betting, but you can monitor it constantly, and you should have severe consequences for those that run afoul of needed regulations.