High School Career
Dupree played high school football for the Philadelphia High School Tornadoes from 1978 to 1981.
As a freshman in 1978, he ran a 4.4-second 40-yard dash, scored five touchdowns as wide receiver and seven more as a kickoff and punt returner, including a 75-yard kickoff return touchdown on his first play in high school.
As a sophomore in 1979, he was switched to running back and rushed for 1,850 yards and scored 28 touchdowns. He also played on Philadelphia High's basketball team, which finished the year with a 33–4 record and reached the semifinals of the Mississippi state basketball tournament, and played first base and catcher for the baseball team, hitting for a .481 average.
As a junior in 1980, he rushed for 2,550 yards and scored 34 touchdowns (25 rushing, 9 by kick return).
As a senior year in 1981, he rushed for 2,955 yards and scored 36 touchdowns. He finished his high school career with 7,355 rushing yards with an 8.3-yards-per-carry average. Dupree scored 87 touchdowns total during his playing time in high school, breaking the national high school record (set by Herschel Walker) by one. In 1981, Marcus' final high school football game was played on the Choctaw Indian Reservation's tribal high school's Warriors Stadium. Author Willie Morris described the audience at Dupree's final high school game as "the most distinctive crowds I had ever seen ... four thousand or so people seemed almost an equal of mix of whites, blacks, and Indians ... After Marcus scored his touchdown, Sid Salter saw Cecil Price, Sr. (who was linked with the murders of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss.) who was ... 'jumping up and down and cheering as hard as anyone ... ain't that a kick in the pants?' "
Dupree was heavily recruited by the major college football programs, and during the final month of the recruiting period, his high school coach, Joe Wood, answered more than 100 phone calls a day from colleges. Oklahoma assistant coach Lucious Selmon spent six weeks in the Downtown Motor Inn in Philadelphia, and head coach Barry Switzer sent former Oklahoma Sooner and Heisman Trophy winner Billy Sims to the town by private plane to appeal to Dupree. On February 12, 1982, Dupree announced he would attend Oklahoma instead of the other finalists, Texas, UCLA and Southern Miss.
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