Gamesmanship happens in sports all the time. From baseball teams stealing the catcher’s signs for pitches to icing the kicker before a big field goal. It’s all allowed and its to try and gain an advantage over the other team. But there is one thing that has seen its use brought up again in recent weeks, and that is players faking an injury in football to stop the clock. It happened last week when Ole Miss was playing Kentucky. Ole Miss running back Matt Jones suddenly went down, and videos showed Jaxson Dart, the Ole Miss quarterback, seemingly told Jones to go down right before he did.
Max Kant, a former assistant high school coach for Lutheran High Northeast for over a decade, said that he thinks there needs to be something done to stop it.
“I’ve never been a fan of it,” Kant said. “I understand in today’s game we need to treat all injuries seriously, but you see some of these guys and it makes you think, ‘Are you really hurt here?’ because a player will be down for 30 or 40 seconds and then he gets up and jogs off and is back in the next play. After two or three injuries, teams should be assessed a timeout and if it continues, then there should be a penalty.”
Back in 2013, Chicago Bear Hall of Fame linebacker Brain Urlacher told ESPN that the Bears had a designated ‘dive guy’ who would get a signal from a coach and would get hurt. He said they would do this to slow down high-powered, up-tempo offenses.
Just a couple years ago during the 2022 season, NBC Sports reported that the NFL fined five teams through the first 13 weeks of the season. There had been extensive talks about this issue during the league meeting with owners in March, and then teams were reminded of it before training camps that season. On December 2, 2022, the NFL sent a memo to all its teams, that was obtained by Pro Football Talk, which said that it had noticed teams attempting to do this and referenced its policy on faking injuries. If a team or player or coach is caught, they can be fined anywhere from $50,000 to $350,000.
Students who are pursuing a coaching endorsement said it slows the game down even more than it already is, and it ruins the integrity of the game. Injuries are supposed to be taken seriously, but when a team has six or seven or eight players go down, and then they come right back in after sitting out a play, it just doesn’t look right, according to the students. When a player normally gets hurt and goes off the field, the crowd will applaud him. But as this happens more and more, fans become less and less sympathetic towards the players.