Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images
It’s hard to blame the college football teams that have taken advantage of fake injuries to stop the clock when you consider there’s never been a rule to discourage the practice. However, that will no longer be the case next season now that the NCAA has finally decided to tackle an issue that’s become impossible to ignore.
Every college football player knows there’s a chance they’re going to get injured whenever they take the field given the brutal nature of the sport, and it’s rare for a game to elapse without seeing a team’s training staff trot onto the field to assist at least one player who’s in pain.
Those interruptions necessitate a clock stoppage, and there’s no shortage of teams that have taken advantage of that reality by instructing a player to feign an injury and fall down to the turf in situations where they either need to preserve a timeout or don’t have any left to use.
That fairly dubious strategy certainly isn’t a new innovation, but it’s recently become a scourge to the point where SEC commissioner Greg Sankey sent a letter to every member of the conference last season to tell them to cut out the “feigned injury nonsense” after it transformed into a bit of an epidemic.
A proposed fix was subsequently floated at an American Football Coaches Association meeting that would require any player who goes down to sit out the remainder of the drive as opposed to a single play—a fairly harsh form of retribution that could only be canceled out if a team used a timeout.
According to ESPN, the NCAA’s Playing Rules Oversight Panel has decided to adopt a slightly less extreme approach to crack down on fake injuries ahead of the upcoming campaign that’s certainly a step in the right direction.
The new rule states teams will be charged with a timeout if a player requires medical attention after the ball is spotted by an official; ff they don’t have any remaining, they will be hit with a five-yard delay of game penalty.
The NCAA will also continue to review footage concerning particularly egregious fake injuries that can lead to conferences doling out supplementary discipline.
It seems like this will be a welcome change, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see.