OU: No surprises at NCAA hearing

Sooner officials discuss violations in men's basketball

? Oklahoma had a daylong hearing before the NCAA infractions committee Friday regarding more than 550 impermissible recruiting phone calls made to men’s basketball prospects during Kelvin Sampson’s tenure as coach.

“I certainly felt we had a very fair hearing,” Oklahoma president David Boren told the Associated Press. “I thought the process was very fair. The people were of very high caliber on the hearing panel and (there’s) nothing new. There were no surprises to us, no new allegations or anything like that.”

Oklahoma officials were called to the closed meeting in Park City, Utah, following an investigation into the calls and several other violations, including four improper in-person meetings and instances where Sampson gave one T-shirt to a recruit and one to another recruit’s mother. Sampson left Oklahoma to become Indiana’s coach last month.

Oklahoma also self-reported eight other secondary rules violations by the men’s basketball team and infractions for holding too many mandatory practices for men’s and women’s gymnastics.

In its notice of allegations, the NCAA also suggested a “lack of institutional control” finding, one of the most severe violations, because Oklahoma had no system to track basketball coaches’ phone calls to prospects and the university’s monitoring procedures “lacked adequate structure or substance.”

The university has argued against the finding and instead requested a lesser finding of “failure in monitoring.”

Oklahoma placed its men’s basketball program on probation for two years as part of a series of self-imposed sanctions.