FanPost

On "flopping"

Right off the bat, I'll state that I have a problem with faking an injury. American football ain't futbol. The game is about being tough and pretending you're hurt when you aren't to gain an advantage just sucks.

While it ain't futbol, it also ain't rugby...the game stops between plays and teams substitute. I don't have a problem with dropping against a team trying to play tempo if you're injured enough that you'd come out against a normal offense. It doesn't make sense that a player should be required to stay on the field if he's injured enough to come off but not so much that he can still walk. Otherwise, a defense ends up either playing injured players (which can lead to worse injuries) or running the risk of getting penalized for 12 men on the field (I saw this happen to a Mississippi State (if I remember correctly; I watched a lot of football on Saturday) player who tried to limp off and got caught on the field when the ball was snapped). As the rules of football are currently (and have been for over a century) written, if a player is injured, the game stops to let him get safely off the field. A lot of the "flops" that Clemson/Oregon/etc. fans see are probably this very situation. A player gets hurt during the play, plays to the whistle, and then drops because he knows that's the only way he's getting off the field. That is absolutely the correct way to play the game despite what some whiny Clemson fans believe, and it looks to be exactly what happened in the Leonard Floyd play based on video.

I'd imagine if we went back and ran the numbers, we had as many injury timeouts in Saturday night's game as we do in any other game against a legit opponent with athletic players on offense. We probably even had significantly less than we normally do against chop-blockin' Georgia Tech. In the end, fans don't need to be complaining unless it becomes quite obvious that players are repeatedly diving and then coming right back on the field. That's not what happened Saturday night, but Chad Morris appears to have conditioned his team's fans to automatically assume that any injury is fake.

In the end, if Clemson fans have a problem with the rule that allows defensive players time to come off the field when injured, they should go to work on the NCAA rules committee. Until then, they should play the game that has been played for more than a century. If their offense is really that good, shouldn't their plays work anyway?

FanPosts are generated by Dawg Sports readers and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Dawg Sports staff or SB Nation.

In This FanPost

Teams