SEC commissioner Greg Sankey released a memo on Friday to SEC ADs and head coaches begging and/or ordering them to the practice of feigning injuries in order to artificially stop the clock.
Feigning injuries has been a vexing issue across the sport for years now. A player taking a dive is something that can be spotted from the 75th row of the upper deck as well as the commissioner's office in Birmingham, yet stopping the practice has proven to be difficult since no one wants to adjudicate when a player is truly injured or just faking it.
Lane Kiffin has become the poster child for purposefully faking injuries, yet he contends his teams flagrantly violate the spirit of the rule because it's done so often to him that, by doing so in return, he'll draw enough attention to the issue that one day the SEC and/or NCAA will step in and stop it.
A common, full-measure suggestion to sideline (literally and figuratively) any player for whom the game must be stopped has thus far been resisted by the powers that be, out of an understandable fear that such a rule would go too far in the other direction and incentivize actually injured players to remain in the game longer than they should.
And so the practice has persisted.
Sankey's memo is the first formal step toward a solution, though it puts a tremendous amount of power in the hands of National Coordinator of Officials Steve Shaw.
Teams found in violation will face a $50,000 fine, then a $100,000 fine, and then a 1-game suspension of their head coach. "Play football and stop the feigned injury nonsense," Sankey said. In case any of the 32 targets of Friday's memo doubted Sankey's sincerity, consider this: the previous sentence was written in bold text and underlined.
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