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Fake injuries are a tactic plenty of football teams deploy to stop the clock thanks in no small part to the lack of ramifications that come with exploiting an issue that’s never really been adequately addressed. However, that could change ahead of the next college football campaign based on a proposal that’s being floated at a coaches meeting.
Anyone who watches football on a regular basis is familiar with the situation that commonly unfolds when a team needs to stop the clock in the closing minutes of a game without the timeouts needed to do so: a player glances over at the sidelines and suddenly collapses onto the field like they’ve been struck by a bullet fired by a sniper lurking at the top of the stadium.
Lane Kiffin has spent years pushing the powers that be to do something to address that unsportsmanlike scourge to no real avail, and you could argue he was trying to prove a point when Ole Miss emerged as one of college football’s worst offenders during a season where the SEC announced it would start to hit coaches with fines it determined a player feigned an injury.
Now, it sounds like there’s a chance that marked the start of a bigger push thanks to an item on the table at the American Football Coaches Association conference that kicked off in Charlotte over the weekend and will wrap up on Tuesday.
According to Ross Dellenger, the college football skippers who gathered for the event are set to debate a proposal that would require injured players to stay on the sideline for the remainder of the drive as opposed to missing a single snap while giving coaches the chance to sub them back in if they have at least one timeout left to burn.
Here’s an interesting discussion point in Charlotte at the AFCA convention to slow feigning injuries: Any injured player would be sidelined the rest of the drive. Coaches could use a timeout to reinstate player.
It’s expected to be on the agenda at head coaches’ meetings today.
— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) January 14, 2025
It might be a step in the right direction, but it seems like it may also be a bit of an overstep in its current form; you have to imagine an exception would be made for quarterbacks, and while it’s unclear if this stipulation is already in place, common sense would dictate the rule would only go into effect after the two-minute timeout in each half.
There’s still plenty of work to be done before the NCAA tweaks the rulebook to directly target fake injuries, and while this might not be the perfect solution in its current form, it’s pretty clear something needs to change.