Fake injuries were issue 70 years ago but it was cleaned up. Can it be cleaned up now?
After a season marred by coaches instructing players to fake injuries for strategic reasons, the NCAA Football Rules Committee declined to make a rule change. Instead, the committee released a statement decrying the practice as “dishonest, unsportsmanlike and contrary to the rules.”
In 1954.
Last week, after a season marred by coaches instructing players to fake injuries for strategic reasons, the NCAA Football Rules Committee declined to make a rule change. Steve Shaw, the national coordinator of officials, said Monday that fake injuries are a free timeout “that goes against every principle of our game. It’s a bad look. We’re intent on taking it out of the game.”
It is tempting to say that human nature remains undefeated, that given the chance to cut a corner, people will cut a corner.
It is heartening to believe that college football has cleaned this up before and will clean it up again.
Except that in 1954, the self-policing worked, and in 2022, college football is beginning Year Three of self-policing and fake injuries are increasing. Fake injuries in today’s game are a competitive issue, a medical issue and an ethical issue that just may reflect today’s society. Finding one strategy to solve all three issues is a puzzle that so far has no solution.
The issue in 1953 came to a head because of one coach – Frank Leahy of Notre Dame.
“Coach Leahy actually had us practice faking injuries,” Johnny Lattner, the Irish back who won the Heisman that year, told Bill Pennington for his 2004 book, “The Heisman.” “If we were out of timeouts, Leahy would signal from the sideline and the right tackle, Frank Varrichione, was supposed to go down and fake a back injury.”
In the next-to-last game of the season, the top-ranked Irish tied No. 20 Iowa with a touchdown after Varrichione faked an injury with a second left in the first half, then tied the Hawkeyes again after Varrichione faked an injury with six seconds remaining in the game. Final score: Notre Dame 14, Iowa 14.
The tie cost the Irish a national championship and earned them an unwanted nickname – the Fainting Irish. The greater loss may have come in the national reaction to Leahy’s tactics. When Iowa coach Forest Evashevski returned to Iowa City, he got off the train, stood atop a luggage cart and recited a poem mimicking the work of Grantland Rice:
“When the One Great Scorer comes
To write against your name,
He won’t write whether we won or lost,
But how we got gypped at Notre Dame.”
Two months later, when the Football Rules Committee met in Sarasota, Fla., Columbia coach Lou Little, representing the American Football Coaches Association, implored the members to let the AFCA handle it and not create any new rules. The Rules Committee adopted a resolution to put fake injuries in the hands of the AFCA “with full confidence in their ability to find effective means of eliminating this unethical practice from the great American game for which they have a primary responsibility.”
That may sound like a sidestep, but it worked. Once the AFCA made faking injuries a point of emphasis, the issue pretty much disappeared from college football for more than 50 years.
When fake injuries returned, they returned because the game had changed. The advent of up-tempo spread offenses meant cramming more plays into less time. It meant offenses playing fast to prevent the defenses from matching personnel. You wonder why so many fake injuries come on first down?
“The defense on third-and-long subs in a sixth defensive back or a blitz package – a specialty group,” Shaw said. “If the offense still makes a first down, they love to run the next series not against a base defense. They hustle to the line to pin the defense in their current players on the field.”
That’s why you get Ole Miss nose tackles doing the worst acting since “Diana, the Musical.” The defense breaks the offense’s momentum and takes a breather.
That brings us to the medical component. Officials aren’t doctors and won’t pretend otherwise, especially with the heightened awareness of injuries in the modern game.
“Years before,” Shaw said, “when a player went down, the coach said, ‘Get up, get up, let’s go.’ Now, if you’re injured, players are taught, ‘Go down, let’s get help.’ That makes this even more difficult.”
The idea that an injured player must leave the game dates to 1890 – 16 years before the formation of the NCAA. For years, a coach could “buy” a player back into the game by spending a timeout. In 2010, the Rules Committee took that option away. The current rule states that a player must leave the game and be cleared by sideline medical personnel to return to play.
The Rules Committee discussed at length last week a proposal that if a player goes down, he remains out of the game for the rest of that possession. Shaw said one Power 5 conference went back and looked at players who left the game because of injury and found that 85 percent of them didn’t return on that series.
The Rules Committee decided not to adopt the proposal. Part of the reason is 15 percent sounds like a small number until you remember it’s real players who really might be injured. There’s also the possibility that going out for a series would be a disincentive to come out of the game.
That leaves ethics, appealing to the coaches to be stewards of the game. The AFCA tried that in 2020. That didn’t work.
“We’ve all tried to handle it quietly behind the scenes,” AFCA executive director Todd Berry said Tuesday. “Our ethics committee voted unanimously that we needed to do something, that there needed to be a cost.”
Last year, the Rules Committee instituted a postgame review, with the complaint going to the athletic director of the accused coach. Whatever the athletic director did or didn’t do, it happened behind closed doors. This year, the Rules Committee has switched the postgame review to the league offices. Commissioners already serve as disciplinarians. We’ll have to wait and see if they make their findings public. If the commissioner chose to suspend a coach, the punishment certainly would become public.
Berry said the AFCA is ready to, his term, “go nuclear.” Suspend the coach for a game, forfeit the game. As things are now, Berry said, “The only ones being penalized are the ones following the rules.”
We live in a litigious, rebellious time. Don’t like a rule? Disagree with a law? Don’t just ignore it. Flout it. Get online and find your peeps. Sell T-shirts. Equate adherence to rules, to regulations, to laws, with losing freedom.
“For the game, that’s why we have rules. It’s always better when we have some order,” Berry said. “Both societally and in our game, there’s maybe not as much order as there once was. … When you don’t have enforcement, you don’t have rules, people tend to push those barriers.”
One Sunday last fall, Shaw took a phone call from a “really upset” coach he wouldn’t name. The coach complained about the fake injuries used against his team the day before. Shaw explained how to file a complaint. He forwarded the coach the form and told him it would take less than a minute to fill out.
“By Thursday, I had not received anything,” Shaw said. “I texted him on Friday morning.
“ ‘I’ve moved on,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to be that guy.’ ”
Somebody needs to be. Somebody needs to push back.