Posted on August 8, 2022

Longtime Oklahoma Sooners Football Assistant Cale Gundy Resigns After Reading Aloud ‘Shameful’ Word Off Player’s iPad

Dave Wilson, ESPN, August 8, 2022

Cale Gundy, a fixture on the Oklahoma sideline and the longest-tenured football coach in the Big 12, resigned Sunday night, saying that he read aloud “a word that I should never — under any circumstance — have uttered” off the screen of a player’s iPad during a film session last week.

He said he noticed that a player, who was supposed to be taking notes during a film session, was distracted and said he picked up the player’s iPad and read the words on the screen, including the unspecified term.

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“I want to be very clear: the words I read aloud from that screen were not my words. What I said was not malicious; it wasn’t even intentional,” Gundy wrote. “Still, I am mature enough to know that the word I said was shameful and hurtful, no matter my intentions.”

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First-year Sooners head coach Brent Venables, who served as an assistant alongside Gundy from 1999 to 2011 in Norman, issued a corresponding statement Sunday night.

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On Monday, Venables issued another statement noting that Gundy said the word “multiple times.”

{snip} “He chose to read aloud to his players, not once, but multiple times, a racially charged word that is objectionable to everyone, and does not reflect the attitude and values of our university or our football program.”

Cincinnati Bengals running back Joe Mixon, who was coached by Gundy at Oklahoma, posted a letter on Twitter saying, in part, “{snip} Coach Gundy is not, and I repeat is not a racist in any way nor has a racist bone in his body, mind, or soul. … I know racists, I have witnessed both obvious and discreet types of racism and have known and detested even more actual racist [sic]. Coach Gundy is the farthest thing from this type of person.”

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