Georgia football: Fake injuries are an issue that the NCAA cannot afford

Fake injuries might make be funny to Georgia football fans as good Twitter meme’s, but allowing them to go unpunished sets a bad precedent for the future of college football.

Who thought going into the weekend that we’d be reading stories about fake injuries? To be quite honest, we shouldn’t be. Georgia football and Notre Dame played a fantastic game that was much closer than many expected and in many ways will go down as an instant classic.

Yes Georgia made mistakes, and they won’t beat Alabama playing like that, but a close game does tend to be more fun for neutral observers.

What isn’t fun is watching one team fake injuries to slow down an opposing offense. It’s underhand, misguided, and detrimental to the long term health of the game.

You know who agrees with me? Brian Kelly. If Kelly didn’t believe that the actions his players took were beyond the pale, he wouldn’t have come out, and straight-up lied to reporters about the situation.

If he really thought what they did was fine, he would have admitted to it as being a legitimate tactic and a part of the game. Instead, he went on a ramble that makes about as much sense as Joe Biden talking about record players:

"“Owusu was evaluated for a concussion. He was brought to the tent,” Kelly said. “So, that’s hard to be booing at a young man who suffered an evaluation for a concussion. Quite honestly, Georgia doesn’t play very fast, so I found that to be quite interesting there would be a number of questions on something like that. Then the other one [Bilal] was cramping.”"

I’m terribly sorry, Brian, I must have missed the concussion that Owusu sustained when he was thrown to the ground by HIS OWN TEAMMATE.

Watching the below clip, it seems that the only person who realized that Owusu had a concussion was Aloha Gilman who I guess we now know is some kind of psychic/wizard/brain whisperer.

Of course the faking didn’t stop there. Why would it after the result was a stalled UGA offensive drive.

With Georgia rolling on offense once again and operating at a really good pace, linebacker Asmar Bilal went down like he’d been hit by a train after he brushed up against Jake Fromm’s elbow:

But sure it was cramped, Brian. Your player was walking back to the line of scrimmage just fine and then ‘boop’ he touched Fromm whose mere presence caused muscles in Bilal’s body to sporadically start spasming just in time to slow down a drive and give they’re worn out defenders a breather.

Yep totally believable. By the way, I have a lovely bridge in Brooklyn that I think would be a good investment; I’ll give you a great deal sight unseen.

Sarcastic comments and joking aside, blatantly faking injuries like this have no place in college football. I like most fans were able to ignore a lot of the bad things we see in the sport because of the endless amount of good that we believe is there.

But behavior like this is a real issue that eats away at the moral fabric of the game. Coaches and players will always push the letter of the laws to win in a sport where so much is on the line. That’s why it’s up to the NCAA; the so-called ‘guardians of the game’ to push back when they go too far.

Back in 2013, Georgia was on the other end of this. Most people seem to have forgotten when Leonard Floyd did something similar against Clemson.

That year, a whole bunch of teams were doing whatever they could to try and slow down spread attacks, and many in the game were rightly worried. The issue has not died away since then, and in 2017 Bryan Zarpentine wrote a column that included some common sense ideas to try and dissuade teams from doing this.

Unfortunately, the powers that be instead decided to do nothing and so we see these actions continue to happen on the biggest stage.

As an Englishman, I have seen the way that this sort of dishonesty can taint a sport. If you want to see some world-class acting, look no further than an English Premier League soccer match.

Faking injuries started out small back in the ’90s, but now it’s a full-on the part of the game. Children get taught how to get others sent off by pretending that you’ve been kicked when you haven’t.

Teams have training sessions purely centered on how to be dishonest and get away with it. This is endemic within the worlds most popular sport, and there’s nothing that can be done about it.

The authorities did too little for too long, and now it’s just a part of the game. Yes, it’s still a popular sport, but many fans have turned elsewhere because they simply cannot stand the level of dishonesty that almost every player exhibits on match day.

I’m not saying the same thing will happen in College Football, but the reality is that if the NCAA  does nothing, these incidents will get worse. Notre Dame faked two injuries because faking injuries works and the officials will do nothing about it.

Georgia is built with its offensive line to wear teams out in the second half and then run all over exhausted players who can’t keep up with a suddenly up-tempo offense.

That’s not a trick; it’s their actual game plan. If you want to stop that, recruit better players, develop better schemes, do more in the weight room, but finding dishonest ways to game the system should never be ok.

Ten years ago, Rugby in the UK faced a similar situation. A player and a medic faked a cut so that his team could make illegal tactical substitutions.

Rugby is not soccer, things like this do not happen, and so the authorities had some serious thinking to do, and they conducted a full investigation.

After it turned out that the club had done this four previous times, they dropped the hammer. The player (who was operating under orders from his coaches) was banned for one year. The head coach, Dean Richards, was banned from the sport for three full years.

He wasn’t exactly a nobody either, Richards was one of the most successful coaches in the game at the time. It didn’t stop there either. The club chairman was forced to resign, the doctor that was involved almost lost the ability to practice medicine.

You know how many times people have tried that since? Zero. A message was sent that institutional dishonesty had real consequences for teams. It’s amazing how little people want to cheat when they know that there are going to pay a price

Now I’m not proposing that Brian Kelly gets banned from the game or anything like that, but the NCAA does have an opportunity here.

It wouldn’t be hard to conduct an investigation and at least speak to everyone involved and get them on the record. That means Brian Kelly, the players, and other coaches who were giving hand signals.

By treating this seriously, the NCAA would at least make it clear that they don’t like their game being embarrassed on national TV.

When it likely turns out that yes, they faked the injuries, then punish everyone involved. Fine the coaches (heavily, it’s not like they aren’t rolling in money), ban the players involved for a game and send a statement to the rest of CFB that this kind of behavior isn’t going to fly.

Follow that up by giving referee’s ability to at least penalize people when it is this obvious.

If you throw one of your players to the floor and the TV cameras notice it, 15-yard penalty for being a dishonest little cheat.

Or, how about an idea Bryan mentioned in his column, if a player has to be attended by medical staff on the field, then they have to sit out the rest of the half. Hard to say that isn’t player friendly right?

Whatever it is, the NCAA has to do SOMETHING. College football has so much going for it as a sport, but this kind of crap is just a bad look.

Nobody wants to lose a game because the other team cheated and to be honest, I don’t believe any player or coach want’s to win doing that either.

They are however going to do whatever they can to win, and if the sport’s governing body fails to discipline those that go beyond the line, then that’s on the NCAA.

It’s not easy being the governing body of a sport like a college football but it is their job. Maybe just once they’ll stop twiddling their thumbs and be proactive rather than burying their heads in the sand.

I’m not holding my breath.