NCAA Rules Committee to look into limiting fake injuries

Early in the 2021 college football season, the issue of fake injuries became a prominent topic. Multiple prominent head coaches spoke out about the issues that began to plague college football at the time. Now, the NCAA is looking to limit fake injuries moving forward.

Steve Shaw, the national coordinator of officials, said via The Athletic that the issue of fake injuries will be a “big topic” at the NCAA Football Rules Committee’s next meeting in early March.

“Obviously, we want to take feigning injuries out of the game,” Shaw said, via The Athletic. “It’s a bad look for the game. It’s an integrity issue. If you have a feigned injury, it garners an unmerited timeout for your team. We’re really looking at: What’s the next step to move away from that?”

Fake injuries began popping up seemingly every week early in the season. With many college football offenses shifting towards high tempo schemes, some defenses opted to slow down the clock by any means necessary, fake injuries included.

Finding a way to limit fake injuries in NCAA football will help uphold the integrity of the game. That appears to be a major focus as the discussions for next season begin.

Many prominent NCAA coaches spoke out about fake injuries during the season

Multiple college football coaches called out the NCAA’s issues regarding fake injuries last season. Among them were Tennessee head coach Josh Heupel and Arkansas head coach Sam Pittman. For teams like Tennessee that have those fast paced and high tempo offenses, it creates issues.

“At times I think people do that,” Heupel said. “In this football game we moved the ball with tempo. And guys end up finding a way to go down and allowing substitutions to happen or just change the momentum of the football game.”

For Pittman, he believes that the NCAA’s biggest problem when it comes to fake injuries and flopping is that officials are having to make split-second decisions on whether or not it is a fake injury or a real one.

“I don’t think you can as an official,” Pittman said of whether you can truly tell if a player is flopping or truly hurt. “I think we take that totally off of them. That’s unfair to ask them if he’s hurt or if he’s not hurt. It’s a coaching issue. It’s a non-penalized flop as long as there’s not a penalty.

“Maybe if you see something after a game and you suspend the coach or the player for doing that, then maybe it’ll stop. But right now you’re seeing 20 flops a game. I don’t want to get too deep into it because I don’t know that all of them came back healthy and I’m certainly not a medical doctor, but it has to be addressed.”