By Fox23.com News Staff
OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. — In a letter sent to the Big 12 Conference, Attorney General Gentner Drummond has asked the conference to sanction Texas Tech following reported gambling violations by quarterback Brendan Sorsby.
Drummond has said that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s claims that sanctions against the school would violate antitrust laws are meritless. In a letter Paxton said that any such sanction would constitute a horizontal agreement among competitors to disadvantage Texas Tech.
“Texas Tech acted consistent with a lawful court order and no athletic conference has the right to punish a member institution for respecting the judicial process,” said Paxton. “Antitrust laws exist to prevent exactly this type of illegal coordinated effort to harm a competitor. Any attempt by the Big 12 to sanction Texas Tech for honoring the results of a lawsuit it was not a party to would carry serious legal consequences.”
“The idea that the Big 12 may not sanction the actions of one of its members under an agreed-upon preexisting contract is facially absurd,” Drummond said in the letter. “By adopting and enforcing its bylaws, the Big 12 Conference is simply ‘upholding integrity and fair play among [its] membership.”
We have reached out to Ken Paxton’s office for further comment.
You can read the letter from Drummond below.
