Kiffin no doubt sweating as NCAA approves much-needed fake injury rule

NCAA approves fake injury rule to take on schools exploiting injury timeouts

Every college football fan has, over the past few years, encountered this situation: their favorite team is building momentum offensively, moving the ball down the field, and it comes to a screeching halt as the defense has a player fall to the ground— often following overt direction from their sideline.

Even if you don't have an incident like that fresh in your mind, we've all seen videos of that kind of thing going on across the sport's landscape. While this practice is largely associated with coaches like Lane Kiffin, faking injuries in order to break up the opposing team's rhythm is a widespread scourge in college football at this point; what used to be a niche and scummy strategy has become far too broadly adopted in the sport.

The cries have grown louder and louder for the sport's leaders to do something about this, and while the NCAA is losing that leader status day by day, they finally decided to step up to the plate.

One of the tough things in figuring out what to do in combatting fake injuries is exactly what kind of legislation to put in place. You don't want to penalize teams that have legitimate concerns with a player being put in a position where he might be hurt.

However, I think this way of going about the rule is the right one. The only teams that will be penalized are those who have a player go down after the ball is spotted. This is far too often what we see going on when teams are faking injuries: the team on offense is hurrying up, and the other team waits to see what their coach says before they go down.

This protects teams that have a player go down in the course of a play, which I think is the right thing. This is a welcome change, and one that will improve the experience for everyone... except Lane Kiffin, I guess.