The NCAA has taken steps to crack down on fake injuries.

Under a proposal set forth by the NCAA Football Rules Committee on Friday, teams would be charged with a timeout or penalty for players faking injuries well after plays.

Specifically, the discipline would come whenever medical personnel enter the field to evaluate players after the ball has been spotted for the ensuing play. Teams will be charged with timeouts, and if they don’t have any, a five-yard delay-of-game penalty would be enforced.

All rule changes must be approved by the NCAA Playing Rules Oversight Panel, which is scheduled to discuss football rules proposals on April 16.

The injury timeout proposal comes after many in the NCAA college football community raised concerns about strategies in which players fake an injury to stop the opposition’s momentum or to avoid using an allotted timeout.

“If we have a player that’s struggling and the official stops the clock to get that player out, we will not invoke the timeout,” Steve Shaw, the secretary-rules editor for football and the SEC and Sun Belt’s coordinator of football officials told ESPN.

“There’s these plays where the ball’s down, the defense is still trying to get to their side of the ball, and a player falls down. Those are the types of plays that we don’t want, that we think is a bad look, and we think this rule will address it.”

Conversations about a rule to prevent practices involving fake injuries have been ongoing since 2021.

“The committee identified the time period after the ball has been spotted as the most egregious violations of the injury timeout rule and is addressing the issue this way,” said Kirby Smart, co-chair of the committee and coach at Georgia.

“Having a set time frame of when the game is stopped for an injured player should hopefully help curtail the strategy of having players fake injuries.”

Several other changes are also being considering, including limiting timeouts once a game reaches a third overtime. Teams currently have a timeout for each overtime period, but the proposal would limit them to one total timeout after the second OT.

Other rule changes being considered can be seen here.