Michigan football has self-reported four secondary violations to the NCAA, accordiing to a report from MLive's Nick Baumgardner via a Freedom of Information Act request.
The violations are all considered minor and will not involve any discipline outside of compliance education.
The most notable of the violations noted in the report comes from secondary coach Mike Zordich's comments in March regarding incoming transfer cornerback Wayne Lyons from Stanford, a move that has yet to be announced officially by the program. Gwendolyn Bush, Lyons' mother and U-M's player development coordinator, was also named after discussing the transfer on Twitter.
NCAA rules state that coaches or staffers may not speak on any unsigned recruits or transfer students until they have officially signed with the school.
The next incident came on March 18, where Jim Harbaugh sent an autographed jersey and team helmet to an auction for a former classmate to benefit suicide awareness. The donation was not reviewed first by the compliance department, and the donation ended up being used to assist in a scholarship fund, which is also against NCAA rules.
"As relatively new personnel, (Harbaugh and associate AD for football Jim Minick) had not yet been briefed on the institution's process for reviewing donation requests," the report reads. "But have now been and will use that system in the future to ensure donations are reviewed by compliance."
The third violation was also in March, when Harbaugh, associate AD for football Jim Minick and special teams coach John Baxter allowed a student-athlete to sit in a premium seating area for a hockey game at Yost Ice Arena.
"Members of the coaching staff were visiting with a prospect during an unplanned unoffical visit the prospect made to the institution," the report reads. "The head coach was scheduled to make a promotional appearance at the conclusion of the second period of the hockey game. ... The head coach made his promotional appearance and then the group went up to the seats that the head coach had used on prior occasions when attending games with his family. Being newly hired, it did not occur to the football staff that the area was considered premium seating until the compliance personnel inquired about it. By that point there was only about a minute left in the competition."
The fourth and final incident stems from a electronic materials/recruiting violation where content was sent to an unnamed recruit that should not have been. Members of the staff named in the report are Chris Partridge and Aaron Bills, who is the person behind many of the photo edits we see on social media.
Per NCAA bylaw 13.4.1.4, electronic correspondence may be sent from a coach/staffer to a recruit (or his/her parent/guardian) before they're signed, but that correspondence must be private. The other bylaw violated in this case is 13.4.1.7.2, which states "an institution may produce video or audio material to show to, play for or provide to a prospective student-athlete, provided such material includes only general information related to an institution or its athletics programs and is not created for recruiting purposes."
These are all extremely minor violations that are not all that surprising to see given a new staff coming in and being out of the college game for a few years. The NCAA has a very thick rule book, so it appears the staff has been educated on these incidents and will move forward without and problems.