Florio: 'Hypocrisy' glaring in NFL's Sorsby ruling
Mike Florio explains the NFL's stance on barring Brendan Sorsby from the 2026 Supplemental Draft and calls it hypocritical amid the massive uptick in gambling sponsorships the league has taken on.
Video Transcript
Well, you never know when I'll be back down in the remote Olive Garden studio for an emergency edition of PFT PM, but events require it today.
Because we've been waiting for the NFL to respond to quarterback Brendan Suersby's application for entrance into the supplemental draft, and the answer has come in the form of the NFL saying, "We're not gonna have a supplemental draft."
Which means Brendan Suersby is not going to be drafted in July, which means he's out of football, at least as far as the NFL is concerned, until April of 2027 when he enters the draft with everyone else who, you know, will have played football in 2026.
Now, the NFL also released, sort of It's technically not an announcement by the league, but when they hand it to NFL Network, it is, because it's all tied together.
And I know that NFL doesn't own and operate NFL Network anymore, ESPN does, and the NFL owns 10% of ESPN.
But it's still NFL Network, and anything that is reported by NFL Network, especially when there's a letter posted, a full two-page letter posted, that's the league wanting it to be out there.
They want everybody to see what their argument is, and this is how things work in the real world.
When the business people want to do something, they tell the lawyers what they want to do, and then the lawyers have to figure out how to justify it in writing.
What do we need to say to allow us to get to where whoever made the decision, and presumably this is a commissioner decision, commissioner says, "This guy's not playing for us this year.
How do we make that happen?"
So the letter that was sent by one of the lawyers to Brendan Suersby communicates the reasoning.
And when you look at it, now remember, to the extent that they expected this thing to get out, there's a PR component to it.
And the argument is, we don't have enough time to look into what you did, and you've shown no accountability for your actions, and you abandoned your effort to try to play college football this year with the intent of coming to the NFL.
You know, we kind of saw the potential for this if you look at some of the PFT items we've posted over the past few weeks.
There was a way for the NFL to keep him out of the draft.
I thought they would either keep him out of the draft or they'd let him in and then suspend him.
They opted to just keep him out of the draft to not have a supplemental draft, and to make some of the arguments that have emerged in the aftermath of the June 8th ruling from the judge in Lubbock County, Texas, allowing him to play college football in 2026.
You gotta take accountability.
You gotta be punished.
You gotta have a punishment for what you did, even though, as agent Ron Slavin explained yesterday on PFT PM, the kid has been punished.
He's lost the opportunity to play college football for one more year at the school of his choosing in an effort to win a national championship, win a Heisman Trophy, possibly be the first overall pick in the draft, and make 50 million-plus on a four-year fully guaranteed contract.
All that's gone.
And he's had his name dragged around in the media, often on shows that are sponsored by sportsbooks.
That's the hypocrisy of all of this.
When you take a step back and look at what happened to Brendan Suersby, his behavior is a product of eight years of bombarding young men particularly with advertisements to gamble.
Everywhere you look, sponsored by DraftKings, sponsored by FanDuel, sponsored by BetMGM, sponsored by this one, sponsored by that one.
And it's not just the ads that you see.
I mean, think about this.
Three ways.
One, the ads are everywhere.
Two, the shows, the content is sponsored.
The logo's always there on the shows that these kids watch.
And you periodically have the voices that you have come to know and like and trust telling you what bets to make.
How do you expect these kids to not eat from the forbidden fruit that everybody else is eating?
Everybody's doing it.
So I'm not saying that Brendan Suersby should have no sanction whatsoever.
Before he developed his addiction to gambling, he decided to bet while he was underage.
He decided to place bets on Indiana while he was on the Indiana team.
He knew or should have known he was doing something he shouldn't have been doing.
The question is, when you ensnare young men in this, this trap that is specifically designed to get young men to gamble on their phones repeatedly, are we surprised that we got multiple players now in the NFL who have fallen into that trap?
Kayshon Boutte at LSU betting on LSU while playing in LSU games.
The only reason he didn't get punished is nobody knew about it until after he was in the NFL for a year.
The NFL monitored the situation and then realized, we can't really do anything here.
If we do something, we're gonna And this is my speculation, informed or educated based upon 25 years of doing this.
My speculation is they looked at this and said, "We may look like bozos for not vetting, for not knowing, for not having one of our exclusive sportsbook partners say, 'Hey, this guy who's in your incoming draft class, he was betting on college football while he was playing.'"
So Boutte got in.
Hunter Dekkers got in.
Hunter Dekkers lost his eligibility permanently for betting on Iowa State while he was on the roster, but not in games.
That's exactly what Suersby did.
But Dekkers missed a year.
He played junior college for a year.
So it feels like he got a punishment Booty got no punishment.
Booty got charged with underage gambling, and then they dropped the charges.
He had no punishment whatsoever, mainly because Big Shield was asleep at the switch and didn't know as he was entering the draft that one of the teams was gonna potentially bring a gambling addict into the NFL.
With Soersby, the difference is between Booty and Soersby, they know about it.
Between Soersby and Deckers, the difference is Deckers suffered a consequence by missing a year of big time college football by playing at a community college.
And this all flows from the question I posed yesterday to Ron Slavin.
This idea that's out there, and obviously it's real, that there needs to be a pound of flesh, that whatever's happened so far to Soersby doesn't count.
Losing a chance to play for Texas Tech this year, losing the opportunity to win the Heisman, losing a chance to win a national championship, losing a chance to be this year's Fernando Mendoza, that's not enough.
We want more.
We want our pound of flesh, and the pound of flesh is he doesn't play football in 2026.
And of course, what is that gonna do to his draft stock for 2027?
Do you think he's gonna go up by not playing, or do you think he's gonna go down?
The guys who will play this year will be the ones who emerge as the top prospects.
There'll be more film, more starts.
That's one of the reasons he wanted to play another year of college football, wanted to get more starts.
The Bo Nix, Jayden Daniels dynamic, this belief that seems to be proven, proving itself each and every year, the guys who play a lot of college football are better suited to making the adjustment to the NFL, especially at the quarterback position.
So look, you know how we do things.
We share the facts, and we share our take on it.
This thing stinks to me.
This, this ignores the realities of modern life from which the NFL is profiting tremendously directly.
And remember, the owners are allowed to own up to 5% of any company that operates a sportsbook.
So it oozes with hypocrisy, and there's a lot of finger-wagging.
There's a lot of moralizing.
There's a lot of judgment that's being focused on a kid who simply fell victim.
And yes, I know he's not a victim, but I'm talking about in the sense of where you're consuming sports content everywhere you go, it's bet, bet, bet, bet, bet, bet, bet.
Hey, you're not cool if you don't bet.
It's fun to bet.
The crown is yours, all that stuff.
What do you expect these kids to do?
What do you expect them to do?
And at some point, it became an addiction.
So I think the NFL has a lot of navel-gazing to do to understand what responsibility it has for what's currently going on throughout the country, young men everywhere carrying it- we're carrying, we're carrying it around.
We're carrying I ran into somebody at the grocery store today, and we were talking about this, and people are starting to realize the inherent falsehood that you'll hear from time to time when people say, "Oh, well, it's good for gambling to be legal because people are gonna gamble anyway."
Well, when you have to go find someone, when you have to venture across the wrong side of the tracks, when you have to deal with potentially unsavory people, when you potentially get yourself into a situation where if you owe the wrong guy money, your thumbs aren't gonna work for six to 12 weeks, that's far different from, you know, "Hey, well, well, you know, what do we got?
What do we got on the phone today?
What apps can I open?"
And you start dropping a few bets.
Hell, it doesn't even feel like you're spending money.
Hunter Deckers said it was like they were playing a video game.
I was telling somebody the other day, when you get an Uber, it's like it's free.
You don't even think about what it costs.
You just hit the button, and a car shows up.
It's all, it's not even on paper.
It's all digital.
Oh, I'm gonna have 30 less bucks in my bank account, but you don't even think of it that way.
So the world has changed, and I guess my point is this: the NFL is applying outdated thinking to the modern era.
I could see if this was 10 years ago before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates for legalized gambling, before it became legalized and normalized and ubiquitous.
It's one thing to get on the soapbox and talk about accountability and whatever else is in the letter, whatever else was in there to get from point A to point B.
It's another thing to do it today.
The world is different, and the NFL needs to catch up because the NFL's still stuffing its money from any way, anywhere, any, any gambling dollar that comes its way, snatch it, grab it, and stuff it in your pocket.
That's what they're doing.
I think they have an obligation to think of this world, this world of gambling, legalized, normalized, and heavily monetized in a different way.
Today's letter reads like something that would've been 10, 20, 30 years ago.
So that's my take on it.
