NCAA suspends Oklahoma assistant DeMarco Murray for 1 game for impermissible contact

The NCAA has found that recruiting violations occurred in both the football and track and field programs at Oklahoma. With that, the NCAA has also suspended Sooners assistant DeMarco Murray for one game due to impermissible contact.

Murray was suspended due to contacting 17 different prospects and their families over 16 months when he wasn’t supposed to be doing so. He has been the team’s running backs coach since 2020.

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A former running back at Oklahoma and later the NFL himself, Murray began coaching in 2019. He started off as the running backs coach at Arizona before moving to Oklahoma. Now, with this suspension, he’ll be unavailable for the Sooners’ first game of the season against Temple.

According to a release from the NCAA, the school, Murray, and enforcement staff agreed that the violations occurred. Among those issues were 65 impermissible phone calls and 36 impermissible text messages. Murray also shared that he was not aware that a COVID-19 waiver of recruiting contact rules had expired at the time.

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The NCAA enforcement staff found that Oklahoma had properly educated its coaches about new rules. So, he should have been aware.

While Brent Venables is considered responsible for his staff, in this case, punishment for him was not considered appropriate.

“Head coaches are presumed responsible for the actions of their staff, and as a result, Venables violated head coach responsibility rules,” the statement from the NCAA read. “In this case, however, some of the violations occurred prior to rules changes effective in January 2023 that shifted head coach responsibility rules from a rebuttable presumption to automatic. Because Venables was not personally involved in the violations and demonstrated that he promoted an atmosphere of compliance and monitored his staff, Venables rebutted his presumed responsibility for some of the earlier violations. For the same reasons, the parties also agreed that a suspension penalty for Venables was not appropriate.”

On top of that, the NCAA also found issues in the school’s track program. There, former head coach Tim Langford instructed a female student-athlete to provide some of her scholarship funds to two student-athletes in the men’s program. This was in April 2023.

That led to Level-I penalties for Langford. Meanwhile, the penalties leveled at Murray and the Oklahoma football program were Level-II violations. Langford received a four-year show-cause penalty and the track and field program is having its scholarships reduced. Meanwhile, the football program is also having several self-imposed recruiting penalties, like a 20 percent reduction in recruiting days for 2023. Several of those have been self-imposed.