The problems with that idea make for a long list.

What if it’s in the last minute of the game?

There would not be enough plays left in the game to really be punished if it’s just an act. That is when stalling tactics are most prevalent since timeouts are gone by then. There wouldn’t be enough extra plays to miss so the faking wouldn’t be thwarted.

Some guys who are really injured are going to stay in there if they are valuable to their team regardless. Even if hurt enough where one minute of sideline time might be enough to help them regain their wind, if leaving the field on an injury timeout means they can’t come back they will probably try and stay on the field and refuse the drop of shame. In that case a no return rule would be at risk of the health of star players.

This would saddle the fans with having to watch sore and hurt players hiding their real injuries and effectively looking useless for a string of plays.

Or if a star player is so badly hurt that he has to leave the game then we are stuck with the backup for whatever period of time is mandatory.

We sort of get that already for a play or two when players are taken out under caution, but it could be a good reason to hide injuries.

The game would become more like basketball where the other team hopes to pound away enough to cause the best players to foul out at the most important end of the game.

FATIGUE AND INJURY INSTANT OUTS

In football fatigue and injury already are instant game outs.

Teams should take pride in seeing the other guys drop at the line, real or fake, because it means they are losing the war of attrition – football is always won at the line (on both sides).

The option that may best discourage faking injuries, and would also not reward a team for having even legitimate injuries that affect the momentum of the game would be yardage penalties.

Field position is king in football.

If an injury timeout occurs there needs to be an adjustment in down or yards in favour of the team that caused the injury and NOT in favour of the team that has the injury.

It would never be advantageous for a defensive team to purposely stall the game – because defences are supposed to be about preventing yards not giving them back.

True it could be double jeopardy, in that the player that is really hurt gets carted off in addition to whatever yardage and down penalty ensues, it’s only fair if you buy my belief that pounding the other guys until they can’t hang on anymore is a major step on the way to winning football games.

If a Giants player were legitimately injured and the Rams were playing no huddle then the Rams should either gain a down, or half the distance to the first down – their choice, and the injured player should have to leave the game for one play as well.

The net effect is that the hurry up offense that was working before the stoppage still works, and they gain more yards because the other team was not conditioned enough to proceed with uninterrupted play. It is the same as if a team calls a timeout when they have none left. It would be delay of game and a yardage penalty would prescribe.

The defending team gets penalized on the spot because the offense was effective at creating attrition and taxing the defense to surrender.

The benefit to the defense is they get to make a full slate of substitutions during the stoppage at the cost of just the yards.

In the grand scheme of things the defensive coordinators will spend less time coaching their guys to fake injuries, and they will spend more time making timely substitutions before their players get caught fatigued during play.

Everybody wins, because players that stay out there fatigued play bad and are more prone to real injuries, including injuries that cost games. This might encourage some of those players to get to the sidelines sooner before they get in trouble.

If a defending player really can’t go and has to drop the price will be a few yards.

The alternative of a player that is injured not dropping to the carpet, or a whole line of guys at less than one hundred percent, is usually a score against. It is a small price to pay for teams that really have injury issues.

There may be times that instead of yelling to players to fake an injury to stop the clock a team will just tell their guys to fake down and take the penalty. That will stop the no huddle formation and allow them to come up with solutions to stop the offense.

CONCOCT SNEAKY SCHEMES

There should still be incentive for the offense to go to a fast snap offense when they sense they have the D on the ropes, but no reward to the defense for getting injured real or contrived.

We are entering a period of NFL football where there will be more teams going to no huddle offense so the writing on the wall is clear. More teams will concoct sneaky schemes to slow them down, so the rules should be tweaked to make sure that does not become the strategy of the game.

Players will not be as blatant as the two bad actors on the Giants were. I would like to think that players are not creating ways to stall the play but that is naive thinking. This sort of thing happens in every sport.

In baseball a batter will step out of the batter box and ask for time out but nobody ever accuses him of what he is really doing – getting the pitcher out of rhythm.

A couple of decades ago before every baseball game was televised the Cleveland Indians used to have Mike Hargrove in their line up. He wasn’t a great hitter, but he got a lot of walks and had long at bats. One may guess why he had “rain delay” as his nickname.

In hockey since the new icing rules have mandated guilty teams to leave the same tired players on the ice while the other team could substitute it has improved the game. There is now a built in punishment for icing the puck and there are fewer stoppages.

To show that it’s a game of cat and mouse with bending the rules you may notice that equipment problems tend to mostly happen when a team is not allowed to make substitutions. Everybody knows what is going on, but the rule doesn’t go far enough yet.

I often wonder what baseball would be like if two mastermind coaches from other sports could ever become managers.

I had a nightmare once that I was watching a baseball game with hockey legend Scotty Bowman managing against basketball great Phil Jackson and I am sure that nine inning game concocted in my sleep lasted seven hours. Those great coaches were known best for being able to read game momentum and find ways to use timeouts and rules to their teams benefit even if a bit shady at times.

We think its brilliant strategy when great mentors do it, because they are so masterful at using all the loopholes in the rules of the games they coached to their advantage.

The key is recognizing when the other team has your team on the ropes and having trained your players how to weather it.

The New York Giants are usually a well coached defensive football team, and we know it because when somebody needs to step forward and do whatever is necessary to survive a play they can agree on who that should be.

FAKED INJURIES PART OF GAME PLAN

Rams linebacker Bryan Kehl played on the Giants before he went to St. Louis. He asserted in an interview with Howard Balzer (101sports.com) this week that when he worked under Giants defensive coordinator Perry Fewell players on the Giants were told to fake injuries if necessary to get their proper defensive substitutions in.

It’s not just that they faked injuries against the Rams but that procedure is part of their game plan in all games.

Only this time they did a bad job of it, or the Rams did such a good job forcing them to do it when they weren’t ready to pull it off as nonchalant as normal.

Perhaps even the Giants stout defense is a little slow getting up to speed this September as across the NFL a record number of points have been scored by teams in the first two weeks of the season. Because faked or not they really flubbed it up.

The NFL can edict all they want that they will punish teams and players for acting out on the field to delay the game, but football is a game of momentum. Right now in the NFL the offense has the momentum. All the changes in the rules have helped the offense so the defences will employ whatever they need and even some methods we might call cheating to counter it.

As it currently stands, with the current lack of a rule, whether the injury is legitimate or not the stoppage just breaks the momentum of the game. There is no useful punishment and no way of telling if a player is just selectively choosing when to go down with a muscle cramp before the ball is snapped.