There’s a good chance that Oklahoma will start a transfer quarterback for the third season in row this fall.

In 2017, Texas Tech transfer Baker Mayfield started and in 2018 Texas A&M transfer Kyler Murray started. Both won the Heisman Trophy. Mayfield was the No. 1 pick in the NFL Draft and that could happen for Murray later this month.

And based on the performance at Friday’s spring game, Alabama transfer Jalen Hurts will start this fall for the Sooners.

Unlike Mayfield and Murray, Hurts has already graduated (from Alabama) and will spend his final year of eligibility at OU. But like Mayfield and Murray, Hurts could win the Heisman Trophy this year.

Some oddsmakers already rate him at No. 3 on the list of potential winners.

On Friday, Hurts didn’t disappoint about 50,000 OU fans who came despite a late switch from Saturday due to the threat of bad weather.

Hurts completed 11 of 14 passes for 174 yards and one touchdown and no interceptions. Hurts rushed for a score while leading the Red squad to a 35-14 victory over the White.

“The man is a go-getter,” said OU safety Justin Broiles. “He is a true leader as soon as he steps into the room. Just from the knowledge he brings and the experience. There is just a whole bunch that he can bring to this team.”

Redshirt freshman quarterback Tanner Mordecai – Hurts main competition – hit 12 of 24 passes for 153 yards, one touchdown and one interception. Redshirt junior quarterback Tanner Schafer, a walk-on, completed 6 of 7 passes for 87 yards and two touchdowns

“I thought (Hurts) handled it well,” OU coach Lincoln Riley said after the game. “He made some nice plays in some scramble situations and made some good decisions from the pocket. He got settled in quickly. He felt pretty settled in the whole time. He gave some guys some chances to make competitive plays, and the guys on his side really responded and made a good number of those. I thought he did a nice job.”

Hurts was glad to get his feet wet at his new school.

“Any opportunity I get just to step on the field, I say it’s a good deal,” Hurts said. “I mean I’ve been playing the game my whole life, so any opportunity I get the chance to step on the [field], I try to take advantage of it. They always say the moment you stop getting those butterflies, those feelings before the game, you should stop playing. The time will come when your time’s up.

“Great fans, great enthusiasm. I think we continue to take steps this spring.”

Mordecai, who is not a transfer quarterback, didn’t accomplish everything he wanted in the game.

“It was cool,” Mordecai said. “There were a lot of people for a spring game, and that’s a big part

“I just stood in place. I didn’t really have anything to do with it. I thought that I just didn’t play as well as I needed to.”

Riley divided the squad into teams and tried to level the talent. Coaches will evaluate every player. Schafer did get in some meaningful plays.

“We split the offensive lines up,” Riley said. “Tanner had the two first team guards right now. Jalen (Hurts) had the two first team tackles. We just tried to make it as even as we could from there.

“It looked like the protection on Tanner’s squad probably wasn’t as strong and we had a couple of competitive plays on his squad that we just didn’t make. I thought there was a period there after the first series – maybe two series in a row – where he just tried to force a couple of things down the field trying to make big plays. I thought he showed some real poise there the last couple of drives just settling back in and taking what was there.

“It was a good response from him, and that’s what you want to see from a young guy like him. You start off great, have a great first series, have a couple of tough series – do you respond or do you go in the tank? He responded.”

Like last season, Riley hasn’t picked a starting quarterback yet. Riley kept saying last summer that Murray and Austin Kendall were “neck and neck” in the competition but Murray was clearly better. Kendall has transferred to North Carolina University.

“This was one practice,” Riley said of the spring game. “It was one event. It’s a little bit different. It’s different schematically because it’s pretty vanilla. It’s different because of the atmosphere. It’s good to evaluate it, but it’s one of 15 too.

“We’ll go back, and we’ll look at it. We’ll get going into summer and into camp. The second we feel like we have a guy, we’ll do it because it doesn’t make sense to keep going on with the reps 50-50 if you get to a point where you know who is going to be the starter. When we know and feel 100 percent confident in that decision, we’ll do it. When that falls, I don’t know.

“If it’s close, a lot of times it’ll get to a couple weeks out from the first game, and you feel like you’ve got to name somebody. If a guy separates, we’ll go ahead and do it, and we’ll go ahead and slant the reps at that point.”

The spring game was also a debut of sorts for new OU defensive coordinator Alex Grinch and linebacker coach Roy Manning. A struggling defense probably cost OU a national title last year. Former defensive coordinator Mike Stoops was fired during the season last year.

Grinch is emphasizing turnovers for the OU defense.

“We’ve had quite a few,” Riley said. “You see the emphasis taking hold. You really do. We got our hands on a lot of balls. We had the interception. We had the fumble there at the end. For a half of football, it was fairly active on that point. Really, another two or three of those tipped balls could have been picked, and with our top cats they may be. I thought we were pretty active, especially the front, and I think that’s where those takeaways always start. You’re disruptive up front. You don’t allow teams to run the ball. You put pressure on the quarterback to make things happen, and we that. When the defense played well tonight was when we got pressure.”

Defensive players agreed.

“Turnovers have been emphasized heavily around here,” Broiles said. “If you are not stripping at the ball, then it is an issue. Grinch is going to let us know. It is not ok to go through a good practice and call it a good practice without any turnovers.”

Cornerback Tre Brown said there is a difference this spring with the new coaches.

“We got a lot out of it,” Brown said. “We were ready to play. We treated this like it was a game and put our practice to our play. It seemed like it all played out what we were being taught.

“Defensively, it is going to  be a really good season for us. You always have to develop trust with coaches, especially new ones because they want to figure you out and you want to figure them out. The biggest thing was just, trust the process and we really trust them, and it is paying off.”

Linebacker DeShaun White said Grinch is big on continuing improvement.

“A lot, he talks about it all the time, you can take step after step moving forward and then you can have a bad day and that can really kill the momentum,” White said.  “That’s been something that he’s emphasized. We had 11 really good practices and then practice 12, it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t to the new standard that we set. It was emphasized that, that’s not tolerated here, we’re gonna get it back up, whatever it takes.”

How is this different than last season?

“It’s hard to boil it down to one thing, because
it was a lot of things,” White said. “Just not tolerating those average days. Having an average day as a defense now is something that we’d get in trouble for – it’s not accepted around here and it’s the way we’re changing the culture.

“You can tell just being in the program, from last year to this year, you can tell the bar is raised. A lot of things that were accepted then aren’t accepted now.”