Big 12 teams consider not playing Texas Tech, given the Brendan Sorsby ruling

This is less a sports headline than a governance stress test for NCAA-like regulatory credibility. The second-order risk is not just whether one team is skipped; it is whether other programs start pricing in a broader erosion of rule enforcement, which raises legal contingency costs for athletic departments, conferences, and media-rights counterparties. The market analog is a low-probability, high-disruption event: the probability of a full boycott is still modest, but the tail is large because even a few refusals create schedule breaks, ticket refunds, and insurance/contract disputes that can cascade across an entire season.

The immediate winners are plaintiff-side attorneys, compliance advisers, and any institution with a cleaner governance posture, because the ruling invites a fight over jurisdiction rather than substance. The losers are the conference and schools that need certainty to preserve the value of their home schedules and TV inventory; their incentive is to posture publicly while quietly avoiding self-inflicted forfeits. That makes the most likely outcome a negotiated settlement or appeal-driven delay rather than a clean precedent, which means the real tradable catalyst sits in the next 2-8 weeks, not over a multi-year horizon.

The contrarian view is that the market is overpricing the rhetoric and underpricing institutional self-preservation. Athletic directors can sound maximalist on camera, but once confronted with revenue share, donor expectations, and contractual penalties, the system usually converges on pragmatism. The more important tell will be whether other schools materially alter scheduling, not what they say; if they do nothing, the headline risk fades quickly, but if one conference member actually refuses to play, the legal and governance overhang becomes a broader collegiate-sports risk premium.