Sources: Michigan's Sherrone Moore expected to get 2-game ban

Michigan football coach Sherrone Moore is expected to be suspended for two games for the upcoming 2025 season as part of self-imposed sanctions by the university for the Connor Stalions advanced scouting scandal, industry sources told ESPN.

The suspensions will be for Michigan's Week 3 and Week 4 games against Central Michigan and Nebraska. Moore will also be barred from any team-related duties during those weeks and will receive additional recruiting-related penalties. The NCAA can still punish Moore in addition to the self-imposed school penalties. A final resolution is expected before the start of the season.

Michigan opens the season by hosting New Mexico before hitting the road for a high-profile nonconference game at Oklahoma, Moore's alma mater.

The second-year head coach was offensive coordinator in 2023 when Stalions, a former Michigan staffer, was first accused of operating an advanced scouting operation by having friends and family attend games around the country and videotape the sideline play signals of future Wolverines opponents. Stalions was alleged to have used that tape to decipher their playcalling signals.

In an August 2024 notice of allegations, the NCAA cited Michigan for 11 violations, six of which were deemed Level I, or the most serious. The school and the NCAA are working toward a resolution.

Moore's suspension ties back to allegations that he deleted a thread of 52 text messages with Stalions.

The alleged deletions came in October 2023 on the same day that media reports revealed Stalions was leading an effort to capture the playcalling signals of future opponents.

According to a draft of the notice of allegations obtained by ESPN last year, the texts were recovered via "device imaging" and Moore "subsequently produced them to enforcement staff." Moore is accused of committing a Level 2 violation, according to the draft.

Moore was suspended for Michigan's 2023 season-opening game against East Carolina as part of self-imposed penalties by the university in a different NCAA case.

The structure of this penalty coming in the third and fourth games of the season gives Moore a chance to coach at Oklahoma, where he played offensive guard during the 2006 and 2007 seasons and graduated in 2008.

A source confirmed to ESPN that the Committee on Infractions (COI) hearing in Michigan's Stalions case will be on June 6 and 7. Sports Illustrated first reported the dates earlier on Monday. There's no guarantee that the COI will accept the self-imposed punishment for Moore as the full extent of the punishment. They could levy additional games to the suspension. If they do stop at two games, there's no certainty that they'd allow the specific games Michigan is offering.

There's precedent in the previous Michigan case for the COI to disagree with a proposal for a negotiated resolution that the NCAA staff had agreed to. It had been widely expected that the COI would accept the four-game suspension to start the 2023 season. Michigan ended up imposing a three-game ban on Harbaugh, and the NCAA later suspended Harbaugh for a full year after he left for the NFL.

The distinction in Harbaugh's penalty and the one Michigan is planning to self-impose with Moore comes with practice time. Harbaugh was allowed to coach practice during the week during both the sanction tied to the NCAA case and the Big Ten's punishment later that year tied to the Stalions case.

Because of an NCAA rule change in January 2024, Moore will not be able to coach in practice for the game weeks of the games in the school's self-imposed suspension. That rule expanded the suspension for coaches to include "all athletics activities between contests, rather than just the contests themselves."