NCAA Rules Committee Calls On Coaches To Clean Up Fake Injuries

A two-minute time limit on video reviews? No more "Walk of Shame" after ejections for targeting? Sign me up.

Last Friday the NCAA football rules committee proposed several changes to the game that we love.

I don’t say this very often about ideas coming out of Indianapolis, but I liked them all. I would even make a couple of proposals a little stronger. Remember that these rules will not be the law of the land until the NCAA’s Playing Rules Oversight Panel meets in April and gives final approval.

Let’s go down the list:

**--Officials would take control of the game 90 minutes before kickoff instead of the current 60. The reason for this change is simple. If it’s a nice day, some players like to go out on the field early to start warming up. But if they get into mischief outside the 60-minute mark before kick, there is no enforcement mechanism to deal with it. The rule further states that anytime a player is on the field during pre-game there must be a coach on the field. The players will also have to wear something that identifies their jersey number so that penalties can be correctly assessed.

It’s hard to get in trouble more than an hour before the game but it happened at the Belk Bowl between Kentucky and Virginia Tech.

**--This one I really like: Once a video review of a call begins, the officials have two minutes to make a decision. If no decision has been made after two minutes, then the call on the field stands. I hope they use the on-the-field clock which keeps track of commercial timeouts. The fans wanted to know exactly how long the commercial breaks would last. They deserve the same on reviews.

**--Players who are disqualified from the game for targeting will not have to make that silly “walk of shame” to the locker room, where they will remain for the rest of the game.

This was a no-brainer. You had players, already upset at being tossed out of the game, making that walk while fans on the other team are giving him the business. Not a good look.

Let the ejected player stay on the sideline with his teammate as long as he behaves himself.

**--No more than two players on a team can wear the same jersey number. If I was the football czar there would be NO duplicate numbers. It’s confusing for the fans, the officials, and the people who are covering the game. There is no need for it other than the probability that the player was promised that number during recruiting.

But here’s the fun one: Steve Shaw, the former SEC coordinator of officials, is now the NCAA's national coordinator of officials. He told a conference call of reporters last Friday that there was quite a lively conversation about players “flopping” or faking injuries.

We’ve all seen it, especially with more teams going to up-tempo offenses. The player flops and his defense gets a chance to catch its breath. Then magically he returns to the game. Some of the acting is Academy Award worthy.

Until now, officials have told me that their hands are pretty much tied, even if they are sure the player is faking an injury.

“All you have to do is be wrong one time and you’ve got a huge problem,” one veteran official told me.

But Shaw said his office will work through the American Football Coaches Association and put the onus on the coaches to clean up this part of the game.

Stanford Coach David Shaw said this part of the game needs to be fixed.

"For us as coaches, it's a tactic that lacks integrity," he said on the conference call. "The ones that are really obvious, we have to talk about those."

“We’re going to show the coaches a lot of video,” Steve Shaw said on the conference call. “We expect to see a huge improvement around that this coming season. If that happens we won’t take action. If it doesn’t, we will.”

How about this: If the game has to be stopped and medical personnel have to come onto the field to attend to an injury, that player must sit out a minimum number of plays, say three or four.

That’s not an ideal way to do it because some guys might try to stay on the field with an injury when they should come out of a game. But I don’t see a day when a college football official drops a flag because, in his judgement, that player is faking an injury. It’s just not going to happen.