NCAA Football Rules Committee to Address Fake Injury Attempts

February 6, 2025

Rick Nyman,

A proposed rule change intended to discourage players from faking injuries that prompt unwarranted timeouts will be considered when the NCAA Football Rules Committee meets this month.

Feigning injuries, sometimes at the coach’s instruction, has become a tactic defenses use to slow down tempo offenses or as a way for an offense to avoid a delay of game penalty or get an extra timeout.

The American Football Coaches Association submitted a proposal that would require a player who goes down on the field and receives medical attention to sit out the rest of that possession. Currently, the player must go out for one play before re-entering.

“The American Football Coaches Association is acutely concerned about this,” AFCA executive director Craig Bohl said. “It goes against the grain of the betterment of our game and the ethics. We crafted this, we floated this, and it’s been received well. I’m sure there’ll be some pushback. Our point (to detractors) is give us something better if you don’t like it.”

The proposal has carveouts. A coach can use a charged timeout to get the player back on the field during the current possession. A player injured by a hit that results in a penalty would be exempt. Also, the one player on offense and one on defense with a green dot on his helmet, indicating he’s allowed to receive radio communication from the sideline, can re-enter after one play.

Injuries perceived to be feigned became such a hot topic in the Southeastern Conference last season that commissioner Greg Sankey put out a November memo admonishing teams. “As plainly as it can be stated: Stop any and all activity related to faking injuries to create time-outs,” he wrote.

The NCAA Football Rules Committee will meet the last week of February in Indianapolis, and the issue will be front and center. If the AFCA’s proposal passes and is approved in the spring by the Playing Rules Oversight Panel, it would go into effect next season.

NCAA supervisor of officials Steve Shaw said Division I conference officiating coordinators gave their support during their annual meeting in Irving, Texas, last week. Shaw showed the coordinators a video montage of players feigning injuries, sometimes laughably so.

Shaw said anyone who doesn’t think fake injuries are a problem would change their opinion after watching the video.

“Eventually, you’re like, ‘This is awful. This is pitiful,’ “said Shaw, who doesn’t have plans to make the video public.

One of the clips shows a player with what appears to be a cramp.

“The trainer walks him out and the guy has this huge grin on his face,” Shaw said. “The trainer makes him lay down and he does the typical stretching his leg out. The trainer is grinning at him, and (the player) pops right back up and he’s up in the coaches’ grouping to go back into the game.”

Bohl said the biggest offenders are rotational players, like defensive linemen and running backs.

“They look over to the sideline and the coach is pointing down, and they fall down and another guy goes in,” Bohl said. “By having that player have to sit out a whole possession, a coach, the ones skirting the rules are going to look and say, ‘Do I really want to disadvantage my team by losing a rotational player?’”

Bohl said if action isn’t taken to eliminate fake injuries, the problem will get worse because coaches will decide if there is no deterrent, they are at a disadvantage if they don’t have their players engage in the behavior as well.

Bohl said the AFCA proposal might not be perfect, but it should decrease the number of egregious instances of players faking injuries.

“The AFCA cannot stand by and look at the unethical behavior of what we’re doing in this aspect of our game,” he said.