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Heather Dinich, ESPN Senior Writer
Oklahoma running backs coach DeMarco Murray, who is entering his fifth season at his alma mater, will serve a one-game suspension this season after the NCAA determined he was involved in recruiting violations, the NCAA announced Tuesday.
According to the NCAA Division I Committee on Infractions, Murray impermissibly contacted prospects and their families before he was allowed to.
Oklahoma, Murray and the enforcement staff agreed that the violations in the football program occurred when Murray impermissibly contacted 17 prospects over 16 months, including 65 impermissible phone calls and 36 impermissible text messages. According to the NCAA, Murray indicated he wasn’t aware that a COVID-19 waiver of recruiting contact rules had expired. During the investigation, the enforcement staff determined that the school had properly educated football coaches on the applicable recruiting rules and the timing of changes to them.
The school declined to say for which game Murray would serve his suspension.
Additional violations occurred in the OU track and field program when then-head coach Tim Langford told a female athlete to give some of her scholarship money to two male athletes in the track and field program. As a result of the violations, the NCAA and Oklahoma agreed that both football coach Brent Venables and Langford violated head coach responsibility rules.
Oklahoma will serve one year of probation and must pay a $5,000 fine. The NCAA also imposed a three-week ban on recruiting phone and electronic correspondence sometime between Dec. 8, 2024, and March 31, 2025. OU football is also not allowed to have any unofficial visits during the Sooners’ season opener against Temple on Friday.
There were also other self-imposed penalties — including a 20% reduction in football spring recruiting days and a reduction of Murray’s recruiting days from 16.4 to eight — that were served in 2023.
“The University discovered the violations through its monitoring systems and investigated, reported, and addressed the matters promptly and appropriately,” an OU athletics department spokesperson said, according to a statement given to ESPN. “The violations in question were limited to the actions of a coach who is no longer employed by the University and a current assistant coach. OU worked with the NCAA to manage the review and reach a conclusion, and penalties imposed by the University are already in effect.”
The NCAA considers these Level II mitigated penalties for the university, Venables and Murray.
The NCAA presumes head coaches are responsible for the actions of their staff, which is why it deemed that Venables violated head coach responsibility rules. Venables rebutted his presumed responsibility for some of the earlier violations, though, because he wasn’t personally involved in them and “demonstrated that he promoted an atmosphere of compliance and monitored his staff.” Because of that, both OU and the NCAA agreed that suspending Venables “was not appropriate.”
According to the NCAA, the enforcement staff determined that Oklahoma’s compliance department had adequate monitoring systems relating to phone conversations, but in this case, the football recruiting staff had not uploaded the respective prospects’ recruiting profiles since they were not yet of recruiting age, and the phone recruiting software included an unavoidable two-month lag in producing phone records.
Murray is Oklahoma’s career leader in all-purpose yards and touchdowns and was the 2014 NFL Offensive Player of the Year. Venables is expected to address the media Wednesday in the weekly SEC teleconference as the Sooners prepare to enter their first season in the conference.