From the end of last night’s first half in the Egg Bowl, as Mississippi State was driving to take the lead, comes what may very well have been the laziest attempt at a fake injury I’ve seen this season:
Honestly, they didn’t even bother to make an effort for that to look good. And why bother? The SEC won’t do anything. (Not to mention it worked — the drive stalled and resulted in zero points as Ole Miss went on to win the game convincingly.)
I’m sure Junior smirked all the way back to Oxford after the game.
Get The Picture 
MSU dropped three td passes in a row then missed a short fg. Did all that happen BECAUSE a guy faked an injury?
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Momementum is real.
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Maybe. The point of these fake injuries is to stop momentum first and to get the defense a breather and get re-organized. Mission accomplished. Whose to say it didn’t make a difference? This kind of crap is worse for the sport than NIL ever thought about being.
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All three were pretty open so if it helped the defense recover it didn’t help much.
MSU players dropped the three td passes in a row. The MSU kicker missed a chip shot.
Blaming 55 for his flop is just excuse-making, plain and simple.
Why can’t we just celebrate Leach for the greatest 7-5 season in college football history? He still has “it.”
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Expectations being the prime motivator of a narrative, not many even thought he would win seven in the SEC West. I’m no Leach fan–closer to a hater, I think the guy’s a clown– but I’m also surprised by their performance this year.
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Leach is 11-12 over the past two seasons. Moorehead had a better record over 2 seasons and MSU fired him.
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You can celebrate Leach if that floats your boat. I’m hating cheating and bad sportsmanship; obviously, you don’t care.
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I’m simply disconnecting one from the other.
MSU dropped three TD passes and missed a chip shot FG. That was NOT the natural and probable consequences of Kiffin’s player feigning an injury. Those failures are on MSU.
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We did this all game at Tennessee. Kirby obviously made it look better than that because even our acting skills are elite.
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So, by that reasoning, this is perfectly acceptable? Not really a question
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Fred G Sanford would be proud of that one
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Didn’t see the events surrounding the injury, did the student athlete get put on a stretcher and carried to the hide away tent, did the medical staff call for the giant golf cart, was emergency surgery performed cause I don’t believe that was a fake injury or the law office of lawyers, guns and money would have been all over that crime scene…
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Hard to find a practical solution. Any defensive, non-contact injury means player must sit out for a half? Or maybe just make it an automatic 5-yard penalty, sorta like the 10-second runoff on other side for offense. Harsh if somebody actually cramps up, but dems the breaks.
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Just sit out the rest of that series. Twice for the same player and they sit the half.
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It’s a “safety” issue.
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I think that’s a bad idea because it will cause a legitimately injured player to try to play through it to keep from being the goat. That could cause the kid to be hurt even worse.
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My pancreas hurts!
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This is part of the reason why the game was so long. Even the announcer had enough.
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Agree. As it went past 3 hours and closed in on 4 hours I was getting more and more pissed about how long it was dragging on.
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How ’bout a little privacy and respect for the injured?! Also, who are we to question his lived experience?
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It’s going to become like basketball or soccer unless they punish you for this. And you can’t blame coaches for using every angle available.
On the flip side, I don’t want football moving at a basketball-on-grass pace. I like having a bit of room for scheming between plays.
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If mot wanting to penalize a team, why not just give them two 30-second timeouts for any time during the game? Something very short.
I hate that they haven’t yet addressed this.
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Could have the ref stand over the ball for a 10 count or something. Similar to a regular counting off a 10 sec backcourt violation in basketball. Give a chance to get set and call something in.
Also makes it slightly less official or intrusive than MLBs pitch count clocks theyre demoing in MiLB
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I saw him give a smile and congratulatory point to a faker in the second half. At least McElroy and Tessitore called them on their bullshit.
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Can’t really blame Junior for using this to his advantage, until they decide to penalize it somehow. His teams are very egregious about it though.
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Maybe in practice they can bring in Slippin Jimmy to show him how it’s done.
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I think Greg McElroy had a pretty good solution to this problem: If a defensive player goes down with an “injury,” he has to stay out of the game for the duration of the other team’s possession…or something to that effect.
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This, or create two extra injury TO’s per half. Right now these “free” injury TO’s is cheating. Burn your two extra TO’s on “real” injuries and the next injury goes against your regular 3. Burn all 5 and the next one is a 15 yard penalty.
That’s if the blame is on the D, but the way teams like Tennessee are playing the HUNH, there might need to be a rules modification to delay the snap on the offense for all but in the final 2 minutes of the half. The delay would allow the D to get set, but not enough for a substitution if the O is not substituting unless they want to risk it.
Hard to thread the needle here, but the design of the game is getting altered if no action is taken. Not sure 7 on 7 football is where I want to see the game evolve.
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This would solve the problem in my opinion. Losing a starter for a possession is a high price to pay for slowing down the offense. Putting in a backup to feign an injury isn’t a great option either since it would weaken your defense for the sake of slowing down play. Not many players are going to volunteer to be taken out for an entire possession simply to slow down the opposing offense.
The HUNH is a two edged sword. If it is working it can move the ball quickly. If it doesn’t work, your offense is off the field in less than a minute and your defense is trotting back out with no rest.
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Looking over to the sideline for his cue too. Nice touch.
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The faker has to sit out the rest of that possession.
AND….while the faker is limping off the field, the other team gets to point to one other defensive player to also sit out the rest of the possession.
This puts two subs in for the rest of that possession.
When that chosen linebacker starts kicking the faker’s ass for getting him kicked off, the problem will subside.
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OR: just give defenses a chance to sub if they want. The only reason this happens is because offenses try to keep a winded guy on the field by rushing to the line and threatening to snap while they sit around and wait for the OC to send in a play.
Offenses have enough advantages in the college game without one, too
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