SEC associate commissioner Garth Glissman addresses fake injuries, possible penalties for teams

The topic of fake injuries in college football has become a hot one, following a handful of cases caught on camera where players seemingly flopped out of the blue, likely in an effort to slow down the opposing team.

Ole Miss has been at the forefront of those criticisms, with the Rebels having a few such incidents.

On Tuesday, SEC men’s basketball associate commissioner Garth Glissman joined the Paul Finebaum Show and discussed the league’s injury reporting policies. He also briefly touched on the concept of fake injuries.

“That’s not within my current job description,” Glissman began, before continuing to answer the hypothetical.

“Well I don’t want to get too far outside my lane, especially on SEC Media Day, but I will tell you in my experience at the NBA, we had to on occasion look into whether a player really was healthy or not. The NBA has some different incentives. In the NBA there were actually instances where star players weren’t playing enough, so the teams would say, ‘The player’s hurt, he can’t play in this game.’ And we’d say, ‘No, we think he’s healthy enough to play.'”

That’s not exactly the case in football, where these kind of fake injuries are often far less premeditated and usually happen on the fly by whoever can pull it off.

Regardless, from an enforcement standpoint, there might be some similarities to the policing and enforcement work Glissman and the league do with injury reports.

“So if you think about it there’s kind of some overlapping concepts there, in the sense that a team may be making representation that the player’s injured but then the league office would be coming in and conducting an independent review and say, ‘No, we actually think he’s healthy,'” Glissman said. “So I’ve given that a little bit of thought, but that’s not currently within my job description. So maybe something for the future.”

As far as teams making misrepresentations on the actual weekly injury reports themselves, Glissman noted the SEC has yet to have an issue with anyone’s reports this year.

Teams seem to be playing it by the book, fake injuries during games notwithstanding.

But what would the SEC do in the event someone was not reporting their player availability correctly?

“Well we would look into it. There are prescribed penalties in each sport, and the penalties are higher in football than the other sports given the financial incentives associated with football,” Glissman said. “Again, having a lot of experience at the NBA conducting these types of reviews, it’s a little different in pro sports than college sports because in pro sports it’s injury reporting. Because the pro athletes, through their collective bargaining agreements, collectively waive the bulk of their health privacy rights, so that’s why you see in the NFL, you know Tua (Tagovailoa) has a concussion. In the SEC, it’s availability reports. We don’t disclose the health information, so there’s more confidentiality in college sports.

“We haven’t had the occasion or the need to conduct a review thus far. Again, the schools have been incredible with their partnership. But if necessary, the policy allows us to call and speak with relevant parties. We never want to get to the point where we’d have to penalize one of our schools, but if that’s absolutely necessary there are penalties in the policy.”