NCAA Rules Committee recommends charging teams timeouts for injury substitutions after ball spotted

The NCAA Football Rules Committee has proposed major changes to the current injury timeout rules for the 2025-26 college football season, the NCAA announced Friday.

The committee, which met earlier this week in Indianapolis, recommended that if medical personnel enter the field to evaluate a player after the ball has been spotted by officials for the next play, that player’s team will be charged a timeout. If the team has no timeouts remaining, a five-yard penalty would be assessed.

All potential rule changes must be approved by the full NCAA Playing Rules Oversight Panel, which is set to discuss new proposals on April 16. This change to injury timeout rules has been made in an effort to combat teams faking injuries to slow the pace of a game and/or avoid using one of the team’s allotted timeouts.

This new proposal would seemingly replace a previously proposed penalty that would have forced injured players to sit out the remainder of the current drive if they required medical assistance on the field. The NCAA Football Rules Committee chose to recommend this new proposal to avoid incentivizing players who are really injured from staying on the field or running off the field while injured, NCAA National Coordinator of Officials Steve Shaw told Yahoo! Sports’ Ross Dellenger.

“We really think this is a good solution to feigning injuries,” Shaw told Dellenger.

Per the release, the impetus for this change is to provide an in-game mechanism to curtail the faking of injuries because committee members think these actions negatively affect the overall perception of the game.

“The committee identified the time period after the ball has been spotted as the most egregious violations of the injury timeout rule and is addressing the issue this way,” Georgia head coach Kirby Smart, co-chair of the committee, said, per the NCAA release. “Having a set time frame of when the game is stopped for an injured player should hopefully help curtail the strategy of having players fake injuries.”

Report: NCAA considering rule change to end fake injury crisis in college football

Prior to Friday’s rules change recommendation, the NCAA Rules Committee was reportedly considering an idea to have injured players sit out a full drive, in an effort to stop the fake injury.

According to Chris Vannini of the The Athletic, this rule would apply to all players except quarterbacks. This comes on the heels of coaches discussing a similar rule change based on a report from Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger in January.

“There’s a push by the stakeholders in the game saying, on feigning injuries, something must be done,” Steve Shaw, national coordinator of officials and committee rules editor, told The Athletic and Vannini. “We can’t kick the can down the road once again.”

The reason why quarterbacks and potentially “the green dot players” could be exempt from this injury rule, is the drastic effect on the game.

“That’s where another idea comes in: to handle differently the ‘green dot’ player — those with a coach-to-player helmet communication, typically quarterbacks and one defensive player,” Vannini wrote. “Perhaps they would only have to sit out one play if they’re cleared to return.”

That seems to be the logical thought in the minds of people suggesting this rule change.

“The green dot exception provides a relief from that and makes the rule more palatable,” Craig Bohl, the AFCA executive director and former Wyoming head coach, said. “Because the guys abusing this rule and going down are rotational players, not the quarterback.”

On3’s Nick Kosko contributed to this report.