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.
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FILE - Then-Wyoming head coach Craig Bohl is seen in the first half of an NCAA college football game, Oct. 7, 2023, in Laramie, Wyo. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)
FILE - Steve Shaw, then-SEC supervisor of officials, speaks during the NCAA college football Southeastern Conference Media Days, July 16, 2019, in Hoover, Ala. (AP Photo/Butch Dill, File)
ROME (AP) — When Italian skeleton competitor Mattia Gaspari became the first athlete to test the controversial sliding track for next year's Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, he did so in a sort of tunnel under a temporary roof built of wooden beams and white plastic paper.
That's because the sliding center in Cortina d'Ampezzo is still under construction and the only part that is really finished is the track structure.
Still, getting to this point little more than a year after construction began is a big achievement for the Italian government, which rebuilt the century-old track despite calls from the International Olympic Committee to hold bobsled, luge and skeleton athletes at a venue in nearby Austria or Switzerland instead.
“It's really been quite an adventure,” Infrastructure and Transport Minister Matteo Salvini said Tuesday.
“I want to thank the construction firm, which was the first one to believe in this, and the journalists who motivated us,” said Salvini, who is also the deputy premier, citing articles claiming that the project would never be done. “Well, here we are.”
Olympic bronze medalist Dominik Fischnaller was the second athlete down the track on his luge before Simone Bertazzo and Eric Fantazzini made a two-man bobsled run.
Simico, the government agency in charge of the 118 million euro ($128 million) project, reported positive results for the test runs. But it will be officials from the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation, International Luge Federation and the IOC to determine whether to bestow preliminary certification — homologation is the technical word — for the track.
Preliminary approval would be a big step in avoiding a backup Plan B option that the IOC had demanded and which would require moving the three sliding sports all the way to Lake Placid, New York, if the track in Italy wasn’t finished in time. Lake Placid officials were hopeful that, if the sliding events were going to be awarded to the U.S., the official word would come by the end of March.
Construction on the Cortina track began in February last year. The pre-homologation plan calls for athletes to begin their initial runs from the junior start, well below the ramps from where they would begin to race for World Cup and Olympic competitions. Sliders would move up the track slowly throughout the coming days.
There are testing events at the Cortina track for all three sliding sports — bobsled, skeleton and luge — scheduled for throughout the fall. Those are important so that sliders can familiarize themselves with the track and feel safe there when competing at the Olympics. Safety has taken on more importance since the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili in a training crash hours before the start of the opening ceremony for the 2010 Vancouver Games.
Luge athletes are scheduled to have an international training period at the new track from Oct. 27 through Nov. 2, then return for a test event there in the final week of November. The bobsled and skeleton tours will hold their international training period from Nov. 7-16, followed by the season-opening World Cup races there from Nov. 17-23.
The 1.749-kilometer (1.09-mile) track features 16 curves with an estimated top speed of 145 kph (90 mph) with run times slated for 55-60 seconds.
Athletes from 12 nations are involved in the tests this week. It's about 60 athletes in all, about half of them being Italian sliders. Coaches representing at least 23 different sliding nations were also invited to view this week's events.
AP Sports Writer Tim Reynolds contributed to this report.
AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/winter-olympics
Construction work takes place at the Cortina Sliding Center, venue for the bob, luge and skeleton disciplines at the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina D'Ampezzo, Italy, Tuesday, March 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
FILE - Construction work takes place at the Cortina Sliding Center, venue for the bob, luge and skeleton disciplines at the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Giovanni Auletta, file)
FILE - Construction work takes place at the Cortina Sliding Center, venue for the bob, luge and skeleton disciplines at the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Giovanni Auletta, file)
Construction work takes place at the Cortina Sliding Center, venue for the bob, luge and skeleton disciplines at the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina D'Ampezzo, Italy, Tuesday, March 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
Construction work takes place at the Cortina Sliding Center, venue for the bob, luge and skeleton disciplines at the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina D'Ampezzo, Italy, Tuesday, March 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
Construction work takes place at the Cortina Sliding Center, venue for the bob, luge and skeleton disciplines at the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina D'Ampezzo, Italy, Tuesday, March 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
