VIDEO If there were Oscars available for Best Actor on a Football Field, there might have been some special awards given for the fake injuries in Monday night’s Giants-Rams game. At one point, as Giants defensive back Deon Grant and linebacker Jacquian Williams sequentially flopped to the ground for no apparent reason, fans had to wonder if there was a sniper in the stadium.
The irony is that the Giants have been hit with a plague of real injuries this season as well. In a period of 24 hours, they lost cornerbacks Terrell Thomas and Brian Witherspoon to season-ending ACL injuries, and defensive tackle Marvin Austin to season-ending surgery on his left pectoral muscle.
Faking an injury to stop the clock has been a common tactic for years, both in the NFL and college football.
In the endless chess match between offense and defense, the offense can dictate the pace. Coaches and quarterbacks frequently go to a no huddle offense to prevent defensive substitutions, particularly when they get a personnel matchup that they want to exploit. Tom Brady and the Patriots are particularly good at that. Peyton Manning is a master of controlling defensive substitutions.
When the defense has no other recourse, the clock does stop on an injury. This tactic became used so frequently that back in the 1990s, as teams like the Buffalo Bills and Cincinnati Bengals used the no-huddle extensively during the game, that the NFL changed the rules. Now, when a player is injured in the final two minutes of either half, his team is charged with a timeout. However, that rule doesn’t apply during the other 56 minutes of the game.
There really is no other recourse than to stop play in these circumstances, because the referees can’t easily distinguish a real injury from a fake, except in the case of atrociously bad acting. The best solution we came up with – simply expand the two minute rule to the entire game and increase the number of timeouts to account for injuries. Charge a timeout for every injury on the field, and give teams an extra timeout in each half.
