NCAA Endzone

This year’s football game between Oklahoma and Oklahoma State will be played on Nov. 24, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, the Big 12 Conference said Monday.

The game, which will be in Norman, had been scheduled for Oct. 27. The change was requested for television coverage reasons.

It will be the third straight year, and the seventh time in the last nine years, that the Bedlam game will be played on the holiday weekend.

The last two years, the game also was scheduled for earlier in the season before being moved to Thanksgiving weekend.

The Bedlam game will continue in that spot on the schedule for the foreseeable future, as Big 12 schedules released last December have the game set for the holiday weekend through the 2015 season.

In a release, the Irving, Texas-based Big 12 called the date change “a cooperative effort between the two institutions, the conference office and the league’s television partners.” The league said the game would be one of four Big 12 games to be televised that weekend, along with Missouri-Kansas, Texas-Texas A&M and Nebraska-Colorado.

Big 12 spokesman Bob Burda said that a request from the league’s television partners — ABC and FSN — was the primary reason the league asked Oklahoma and Oklahoma State to change the date of the game.

Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops said he has favored having an open week just before the Big 12 Championship game in the past, but changed his mind after looking over the team’s performance history.

“We’ve played in five of those games during our eight years here and the only one we didn’t win had an open week before we went to play,” Stoops said. “Of the four we’ve won three went directly from our last regular season game to the championship game. If that’s what works best for us, I’m all for it.”

Oklahoma State has consistently supported playing the Bedlam game on Thanksgiving weekend, while Oklahoma generally has preferred to have an open date, citing a desire to keep the holiday weekend open for athletes and fans and also to have an extra week to prepare if the Sooners competed in the Big 12 Championship game the following week.

Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Bedlam Game