FRISCO, Texas -- Every week during the season, Joey McGuire watches the tape to review how his team played on the field. The best coaches are masters of self-evaluation as it pertains to their teams' performance. But not much of Texas Tech's offseason has been about the team's performance.
It's been defined by the Brendan Sorsby saga and the war of lawsuits and words over his eligibility. McGuire will not have Sorsby behind center when the season kicks off in September, but with some time to reflect, CBS Sports asked him what he would have done differently.
"If I would have been able to have a crystal ball and see in the future, as far as would they have had a supplemental draft, I would have probably said [earlier], 'Brendan, let's don't do this. Go to the supplemental draft,'" McGuire said this week at Big 12 Media Days.
McGuire was clear that the statements the school made, like the 20-minute video posted on social media and the various long-form written messages from athletic director Kirby Hocutt and board of regents chairman Cody Campbell, were directed at the Red Raiders fanbase, which can be seen in the fact that they were all formatted as letters to the school's fans. In a sense, Texas Tech was attempting to position its statements as playing to its base.
But the school clearly miscalculated the level of pushback they would face from athletic directors and presidents, both inside and outside the Big 12, which McGuire also admitted. Nebraska, for instance, announced internally that it would not schedule the Red Raiders in any sport.
Outrage reigned in the administrative class, and the league posed a united front, 15-1, opposed to Tech playing Sorsby. A legal threat by the attorney general of Texas drew other state attorneys general into the fray and allowed the Big 12 to sue the school on First Amendment grounds, creating a separate legal battle deemed not worth fighting, but the timing didn't allow the NFL to formally vet Sorsby. Sorsby was passed over in the NFL's supplemental draft and denied entry into the CFL. He is effectively banned from the sport at a level commensurate with his talent until next season.
Beyond saying "we're going forward as 16 strong," Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark had no further comment about the situation either at the podium or in an interview with CBS Sports.
Lost in all the Sorsby drama is Will Hammond, the gifted young quarterback who spelled an injured Behren Morton last season and was expected to be the team's QB of the future until an ACL injury late last season knocked him out for nine months. When that happened due to Hammond's status being up in the air as far as his return from injury, McGuire told CBS Sports he wouldn't have added Sorsby at all, a player who came to Tech expecting to start.
"I would have brought in a vet, just because that's such a young room, you know, I would, we would have done that, but the whole point of bringing in Brendan, it was, whenever in this day and age, whenever you have the amount of money invested in a roster, you've got to make sure that you're protecting that money from the standpoint of how are they going to come back from the injury, you're hoping that they come back 100% and ready to roll, but you never know, because different people respond to different injuries,"
McGuire is expecting Hammond to be fully cleared on Aug. 21, exactly nine months from when he suffered the injury in the first place. McGuire confirmed that he's been participating in player-led seven-on-seven passing drills.
Sorsby is training in Dallas ahead of next April's NFL Draft, but is expected to be in Lubbock frequently to visit his girlfriend, and McGuire maintains an open-door policy toward him.
"He chose us, you know, and I expect and hope whenever he's a starting quarterback for an NFL team, and it's on a Monday Night Football, it's 'Brendan Sorsby, starting quarterback for whatever team, Texas Tech University', you know, I think that's what he's going to say, you know. He might say Lake Dallas High School, that'd be good too."
The head coach joked that when he coaches a player, they're stuck together for the rest of the player's life. The school has said it will continue to support Sorsby's recovery from gambling addiction and will not ask for the money back paid to him via the rev share agreement before he ended his college career.
