NORMAN — By John Shinn

Transcript Sports Writer

There were a lot of newsworthy items to emerge from Thursday’s press conference with Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops, defensive coordinator Mike Stoops and offensive coordinator Josh Heupel.

Here are a few of them:

· The coaching staff isn’t ready to name Blake Bell the starting quarterback and seems perfectly fine with waiting until August to do so.

· The Sooners will experiment with a 3-4 defensive scheme this spring, but they’re not ready to say they’re changing to it from the 4-3 they’ve run since Bob Stoops took over as head coach in 1999.

· Bob Stoops said the only players he knew for sure would miss all of spring practice are: offensive lineman Nila Kasitati and fullback Aaron Ripkowski.

· Highly touted defensive end D.J. Ward, who is attending classes at OU, still hasn’t been fully sanctioned by the NCAA clearinghouse and he’ll be held out of practice until that happens.

· The Sooners will play a non-Saturday regular-season game for the first time since 2007. The Big 12 announced Thursday that OU’s game at Baylor has been moved to Nov. 7 (a Thursday). The Sooners already had an open date the week before. The game will be televised by either ESPN or Fox.

As part of the Big 12’s television contract every team must play a Thursday game at least once over a two-year span. Playing one in Norman, however, is unlikely.

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