Oklahoma running backs coach DeMarco Murray, who is starting his fifth season at the school, will serve a one-game ban this season after the NCAA decided he was implicated in recruiting infractions, the NCAA announced on Tuesday.
According to the NCAA Division I Committee on Infractions, Murray improperly contacted recruits and their families before he was permitted to.
Oklahoma, Murray, and the enforcement staff all agreed that the breaches in the football program occurred when Murray improperly contacted 17 recruits over a 16-month period, including 65 phone calls and 36 text messages. According to the NCAA, Murray stated that he was unaware that a COVID-19 waiver of recruiting contact regulations had expired. During the review, the enforcement team decided that the school had adequately informed football coaches on the relevant recruiting regulations and the timing of any modifications to them.
The school did not specify which game Murray’s punishment would be for.
Additional infractions occurred in the OU track and field department when then-head coach Tim Langford instructed a female athlete to distribute some of her scholarship money to two male competitors in the track and field program. As a result of the offenses, the NCAA and Oklahoma concluded that football coaches Brent Venables and Langford had violated head coach responsibility standards.
Oklahoma will serve a year on probation and must pay a $5,000 fine. The NCAA also issued a three-week restriction on recruiting phone and electronic correspondence between December 8, 2024, and March 31, 2025. OU football is also prohibited from having any unauthorized visits during the Sooners’ season opener against Temple on Friday.
Other self-imposed sanctions, such as a 20% reduction in football spring recruiting days and a reduction of Murray’s recruiting days from 16.4 to eight, 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 official told ESPN in a statement. “The infractions in question involved the activities of a former University coach and a present assistant coach. OU cooperated with the NCAA to handle the review and achieve a resolution, and the University’s penalties are already in place.”
The NCAA considers these Level II mitigated penalties for the university, Venables and Murray.
The NCAA presumes that head coaches are accountable for the acts of their staff, which is why it determined that Venables violated head coach responsibility guidelines. Venables refuted his assumed culpability for some of the earlier violations, claiming that he was not personally involved in them and that he “demonstrated that he promoted an atmosphere of compliance and monitored his staff.” As a result, both OU and the NCAA decided that Venables’ suspension “was not appropriate.”
According to the NCAA, the enforcement staff determined that Oklahoma’s compliance department had adequate monitoring systems in place for phone conversations. However, in this case, the football recruiting staff had not uploaded the respective prospects’ recruiting profiles because they were not yet of recruiting age, and the phone recruiting software had an unavoidable two-month lag in producing phone records.
Murray is Oklahoma’s career all-purpose yardage and touchdown leader, and he was named NFL Offensive Player of the Year in 2014. Venables is scheduled to speak to the media Wednesday at the weekly SEC teleconference as the Sooners prepare for their first season in the conference.