Oklahoma's proposed sanctions will put the pressure on Lon Kruger

On Thursday afternoon, Oklahoma offered themselves up on the NCAA's chopping block for violations committed by assistant coach Oronde Taliaferro. If you've forgotten, Taliferro, through a financial advisor in Florida, orchestrated a payment of $3,000 to Keith "Tiny" Gallon in an effort to help Gallon pay for his high school transcripts so he can enroll in college.

Those violations led, in part, to Jeff Capel's firing as the head coach of the Sooners.

Here is what Oklahoma, who was already on probation thanks to Kelvin Sampson and his phone calls, is proposing:

Oklahoma asked the NCAA to place the program on two more years of probation, vacate its wins from a 13-18 season in 2009-10 and take away one scholarship, two official visits and 10 in-person recruiting days during the upcoming academic year.

Losing a scholarship is not a huge deal in college basketball. Teams often don't use their full allotment of 13 scholarships, and if they do, that final scholarship player is usually a walk-on that gets lucky. The recruiting sanctions -- losing two official visits and 10 in-person recruiting days -- is just as trivial. Its not an ideal situation, but its essentially a glorified slap on the wrist. And I'm not going to get into another rant about how pointless it is to vacate a season, particularly a season that everyone in Norman is more than willing to forget.

The only punishment with any juice that Oklahoma offered up is the two extra years of probation, a sanction that the program has already violated.

Considering that the Sooners qualify as repeat violators -- two major infractions in five years -- its tough for me to believe that the NCAA is going to accept their proposal. Then again, the NCAA also believes vacating a season is a major punishment, so who knows.

The only thing that I know is that the start of the Lon Kruger era in Oklahoma just got that much tougher.

I agree with Matt Norlander. Kruger had to have known that something like this was coming when he agreed to leave UNLV this spring (well, that and he doubled his old salary for the next seven years). Because as trivial as some of the sanctions that Oklahoma proposed are, their effect will get magnified by the fact that Kruger has to rebuild an Oklahoma program that has spent the past two seasons buried at the bottom of the Big 12 and isn't expected to go anywhere soon.

Convincing blue-chip recruits to be the foundation in a rebuilding process is difficult enough. Having to do so with limits on recruiting makes it that much harder. Kruger -- who will make $16.6 million over the next seven years -- has to be efficient in his recruiting. He has to find players that he has a realistic shot of getting and that can positively effect the program, and he has to make sure that those players end up at Oklahoma.

More than anything, these sanctions are going to make Kruger's margin for error microscopic.