Head coach David Shaw featured in ESPN piece on ‘faking injuries’

You can see it on the field at times. But even you question it on a television broadcast.

The players certainly don’t want to do it. Let alone continue to talk about it even after their college days are done.

The ‘art of faking injuries in college football’ sounds like a term taken from a movie script. But no, here we are in today’s world of college football talking about it.

The competition committee set up by the NCAA even met about it earlier this February, a committee that Stanford head coach David Shaw sits on.

In fact, the phenomenon of faking injuries and getting away with it (well, at least not in Cal’s sake), has gotten out of hand so much so that the competition committee set up shop in February while in Indianapolis to watch videos of faked injuries, coaches coaching injuries and to discuss what to do about it.

Shaw was quoted in the long-form ESPN article saying the videos watched ‘turned my stomach.’

“We’re drawing a line that says, ‘This is cheating. This is not what the game was meant for. We don’t want this to be part of our game.’”

According to the story as well, Shaw was quoted as having brought up the word ‘integrity’ several times during the committee meetings. Discussing things from when and where they’ve happened on camera to how important the tradition of fans applauding the ‘actual injured’ leave the field when they do so and how that’s gone away.

And when it came time to come up with a solution, as impossible as it may seem, Shaw thinks they’ve gotten off to a good start.

“I’ll say this as directly as possible: This is on the coaches, this is not on the players,” David Shaw said. “This is on coaching integrity, and don’t let anyone tell you anything different. This is not just trying to win games, it has to do with integrity. It’s hard to legislate integrity.”

As crazy as it may seem, we may see head coaches shoulder even more responsibility in the near future, coaching their coaches to not coach their players to fake injuries. There we are again with a line that seems it has come straight from a movie script.

You can read the full long-form article here, penned by Alex Scarborough.

With so many solutions tossed around, one of them has to stick, right? How would you fix it?