AFCA director says it's a 'really bad look' for college football players to fake injuries
Todd Berry, the executive director of the American Football Coaches Association, thinks it’s a “really bad look” for college football players to fake injuries. And it’s possible that could lead to some rules changes in the future.
On Tuesday, Berry spoke at the final day of the AFCA’s annual convention (being held in Nashville), and this was one of the topics that came up, according to ESPN’s Adam Rittenberg. Berry said the ethics committee has approached the NCAA rules committee about the issue, and that one possibility is that teams could be charged a timeout if a player fakes an injury.
The reasoning behind a player acting injured, even if he really isn’t, is that it can stop the clock without using a timeout.
It’s been an issue for a while, as coaches were reportedly warned last offseason that new punishments could be coming if this doesn’t stop happening across the sport. Perhaps that will lead to the change brought up by Berry this week.
Rittenberg also tweeted that Berry suggested a “Targeting 1/Targeting 2 model” for targeting calls, which would help define malicious intent. Currently, all targeting penalties lead to that player being disqualified for the rest of the game.
While nothing has been made official regarding these potential changes, it could be something to watch for this offseason.
Unless they develop a way to read minds, they can never know a players intent. Rules should be based on what is visible on the field and not what officials think someone intended.
Kentucky is notorious for it year after year they get more ridiculous.
Instead of “intent” the differentiation should be something more like how egregious or severe the contact was. It’s visibly obvious that some targeting calls are a more technical application of the rules versus calls that are due to truly violent hits.
Sometimes the offensive player actually lowers their head or hunches over actually causing the head to head contact. In these cases I could see an alt call.
I totally agree with that. Once a defender has made his terminal move, there is nothing he can do if the other player changes position.
100%
Actually the correct call should be that the offensive player initiated the contact and NO FOUL! UNLESS they start calling Targeting on the offensive players! I’ve seen some very blatant targeting that warranted the foul and others where the defender had nothing to do with the helmet to helmet contact but still got the foul. Now that they are all reviewed, they should look at WHO initiated the hit!
I don’t like it, but it is pretty hard to say a player faked the injury. About the only time it could be done is those that are standing there and then drop like they’ve been shot.
The fake injury thing could easily be resolved by forcing the “injured” player to sit out x number of plays to recover from the “injury, whether faked or not.
This is a good idea, so there is little chance the dummies at the NCAA will implement it!