SEC to crack down on dubious injury timeouts: 'Play football and stop the feigned injury nonsense'

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey would like teams in his conference to stop faking injuries.

Sankey wrote a letter to the athletic directors and coaches of the 16 schools in the SEC on Friday telling them to cut down on injury faking. It’s not uncommon for teams to have a player go down if an opposing offense is running a hurry-up in an effort to keep the defense from substituting and the practice is not foreign to the offensive side of the ball either. If you’ve watched college football long enough, you’ve seen a game where a player goes down in circumstances that are, uh, a little suspect.

Sankey’s letter ends with the line “play football and stop the feigned injury nonsense." In it, he says that the SEC will submit video to the National Coordinator of Officials if “a circumstance warrants” regarding a faked injury and that teams will be penalized if a player has been found to fake an injury to cause a stoppage.

The penalties are a fine of $50,000 and a public reprimand for the head coach on the first faked injury, a $100,000 fine and reprimand on the second fake injury and a third finding “will result in suspension of the head coach for the team’s next contest.”

"Moving forward, I will consider a feigned injury to have been determined when the National Coordinator states it is more likely than not that a feigned injury occurred, that a player attempted to feign an injury, or any other general statement from the National Coordinator states that 'the action of a feigned injury can never be absolutely verified via video, and I cannot say with absolute certainty if the player was truly injured … ' a feigned injury will be found to have occurred unless the National Coordinator accepts clear medical information establishing the player had to disrupt the game for an injury time out and modifies the feigned injury finding in a timely manner."

That paragraph is followed by an underlined sentence that states “your team should be prepared to compete fairly under the rules of the game.”

With five weeks left, there's a decent chance a coach in the conference will receive a reprimand from the league before the end of the regular season. It'll be fascinating to see which team gets punished first.