Sorry, Rebels - Greg Sankey ready to lay down the law against SEC football teams that fake injuries

The 2024 SEC football season has been a wild one. We've got Texas and Oklahoma in the league. We've got Vanderbilt of all teams wreaking havoc. And we're trying to sort out all the madness in route to what will be the first year of the 12-team College Football Playoff.

But despite all of that, what's been one of the biggest stories on the field this season? Fake injuries.

You see it every single weekend across the sport, but it's a particular issue in the SEC. An offense hits a big play, that offense tries to hurry up to the ball to snap it again, and then a defender who was seemingly fine two seconds ago suddenly drops down to the ground with an apparent injury. The clock stops, trainers come out, they walk the player off the field, and then a play later he comes trotting back out like nothing was wrong with him.

And that's because nothing was, in fact, wrong with him. He was faking to help out his team, but the officials can't do anything about it because the chance technically exists that he may be seriously hurt.

Well now the SEC is doing something about it.

On Friday, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey sent out a memo to SEC programs addressing the problem and threatening fines and suspensions for teams that are believed to have faked injuries. Sankey, clearly, is sick of it (we all are), telling his teams to "play football and stop the feigned injury nonsense" at the end of his address.

Finally, it seems we won't have to suffer through watching these pathetic attempts at disrupting the games now that legitimate penalties are on the way for offenders.

Lane Kiffin and Ole Miss get roasted after news of SEC cracking down on fake injuries

There's one team who's been guilty of faking injuries substantially more than everyone else in the SEC, and probably the country: the Ole Miss Rebels.

Almost every team has faked an injury at some point, but since Lane Kiffin got to Oxford, the Rebels have abused that loophole constantly. Perhaps their most egregious came earlier this season, and they weren't even on defense! They took advantage while on offense!

So naturally, once news came out that the SEC was taking measures to assure these fake injuries come to an end, SEC football fans on "X" had a field day making fun of Kiffin and Ole Miss.

Ole Miss fans have been quick to argue that Kiffin only had his players faking injuries because he was, in a convoluted way, trying to show the SEC that changes needed to be made, and they were only doing it in retaliation against teams that used the same tactic against them when they brought their tempo offense to the league in 2020.

That's quite the spin zone if you ask me.

It's going to be hilarious watching Ole Miss take the field tomorrow and suddenly not have players dropping to the ground every other snap. Kiffin's going to have to make quite the adjustment to his playbook now. Obviously none of this is likely to make any sort of a difference when Mississippi State faces the Rebels on Black Friday for the Egg Bowl, but at least now the game should be over with quicker.