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Texas Tech football was thrust into a national controversy this week when transfer quarterback Brendan Sorsby checked into gambling addiction rehab.
The football program is now facing a new controversy after one of its top donors has attracted a different type of controversy in recent months.
Texas Tech alumnus Cody Campbell, a prominent energy industry billionaire and GOP donor, told Fox News Digital in an interview Friday, three days before news broke of Sorsby’s entrance into gambling addiction treatment, that he had “concern” with consistency and enforcement of what is allowed in college sports and what isn’t.
“I have concern with consistency and enforcement. I have concern with, you know, the difficulty that schools have in, you know, navigating the rules. I mean, most schools don’t even know what the rules are. It’s, it’s not clear what’s legal and what’s not legal,” Campbell said when asked if he has a concern with the current state of oversight in the NCAA.
“I mean, I think the entire governance model right now in college sports is completely broken and ineffective. Nobody has the authority or ability to enforce any rules right now.”
Campbell did not provide further comment after news of Sorsby’s rehab broke.
Campbell got into a heated debate with Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark earlier this month over the move of a Texas Tech football game to a Friday night, which Campbell publicly called “absurd.” Yormark publicly stated that Campbell “does not run the Big 12” and reminded him that conference decisions are made by officials, not boosters.
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Campbell addressed his relationship with the conference commissioners in the interview Friday with Fox News Digital.
“The commissioners, you know, I get along with some of them better than others,” he said.
“You know, it seems like that some people think that it’s, it might be an advantage for nothing to happen for chaos to, to persist because some conferences have, well, I should say some members of some conferences have benefited from, from the chaos. And so maybe some people don’t want anything to happen.
“I also have a problem with a commissioner or anybody else who doesn’t care about all the benefit that is derived from college sports and is only interested in preserving their own power position or, you know, big salary that they receive.”
Campbell, a Republican who says he is aligned with President Donald Trump’s vision to “save college sports” via NIL and transfer portal regulation, admitted he has been criticized for some of his philosophical beliefs on college sports governance.
Campbell, as the focus of multiple ESPN profile pieces in recent months as a figure who wants to help in the effort to “save college sports,” admits he has also been criticized for his attempted intervention in college sports as a whole as a booster for just a single school.
“I mean, yeah, I mean, of course they have,” Campbell said when asked if he has been criticized for his belief in strict regulation over NIL and the transfer portal.
“But people that say those kinds of things don’t understand that, like, you know, the vast majority of the funding that is going to subsidize these massive deficits, the vast majority of the money that goes to support our universities is coming from taxpayer dollars. Furthermore, most of the institutions we’re talking about here, the vast majority are publicly owned already. They’re not private entities.”
Campbell believes that, unlike the energy industry, college sports are “not a free market.”
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“This is not at all the same as a private business like mine, which is owned by private individuals,” Campbell said.
“This is not a free market. This is a, a government-subsidized program essentially that is aimed at providing opportunity, providing social mobility and providing leadership development for the entire country.”
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