Flopping in NCAA football, LSU Game Thoughts

I took a look at the current NCAA football rulebook, and though it doesn’t have a rule about flopping, it identifies it as cheating, explicitly, in the “The Football Code” section, a section about ethical play. It opens:

Football is an aggressive, rugged contact sport. Only the highest standards of sportsmanship and conduct are expected of players, coaches and others associated with the game. There is no place for unfair tactics, unsportsmanlike conduct or maneuvers deliberately designed to inflict injury. The American Football Coaches Association (AFCA) Code of Ethics states: a. The Football Code shall be an integral part of this code of ethics and should be carefully read and observed. b. To gain an advantage by circumvention or disregard for the rules brands a coach or player as unfit to be associated with football.

With regard to flopping, it says this:

Feigning an injury for any reason is unethical. An injured player must be given full protection under the rules, but feigning injury is dishonest, unsportsmanlike and contrary to the spirit of the rules. Such tactics cannot be tolerated among sportsmen of integrity.

So, by the letter of the rulebook, Coach Kiffin lacks integrity. I just found that interesting.

Looking at the rest of the code, it also names trash talking as “illegal” and it elaborates about why holding is cheating, two ubiquitous features of the game. On the broadcast of the South Carolina game, the sideline announcer showed an Ole Miss player with a couple of tennis balls wrapped up in tape around his hands, something Ole Miss tried during practice. Holding sucks, but mostly because it completely stops the game with the penalty flag. Football is painful to watch with all the stoppages in play. It’s absurd, really. Holding could be prevented on the lines if players had to wear mitts. I don’t care so much about trash talking because the refs never flag that as an infraction. I see players wagging their jaws all the time.

The Wake Forest coach, I forget his name, argued during his post-game press conference that flopping could be eliminated if the flopping player had to sit out the drive, and that could be done under the guise of player safety. If we see a change like that in next year’s rulebook, you can absolutely thank Lane Kiffin, because no team has done more to showcase flopping than Ole Miss during this 2024 campaign. I saw another explicit flop from the defense in the LSU game, and the LSU crowd just went nuts about it.

That LSU game. I’m telling you, that was a hard loss for this Ole Miss team. Everybody is an armchair quarterback after a loss, but this one was a weird game. As everybody has said, LSU never led in this game until the last play. Ole Miss had chances to put the game out of reach, and it failed to execute. It’s hard to understand why the Ole Miss coaches insist on throwing deep balls, but as soon as I wrote that, I realized that if it hits the deep balls, everybody loves it. If Tre Harris hadn’t muffed that deep pass early, Ole Miss goes up by a touchdown early and that goes a long way to quieting the lathered-up mob. It hit him right in the breadbox, too. On a 4th and 1 from something like the 4 yard line, Ole Miss ran it up the middle on a quick-snap, and LSU stuffed it. Don’t forget the missed field goal. All told, thats 17 points Ole Miss left on the football field. Combine that all the penalties, all the holding calls, and as I watch the game, I got that familiar feeling, that Ole Miss was going to find a way to lose. Sure enough, it did. That’s significant, I think, because I know I was hoping that Ole Miss would find a way to win these kinds of games, that it had turned a corner.

Ulysses Bently ran the ball in this game, so I want to point that out. He had a good game, breaking 50-yard touchdown run. One wonders why he hasn’t played to this point, the seventh game of the season.

I could keep going, but suffice it to say, this season is looking like a major disappointment, because anything less than a playoff bid will be a disappointment, and the only way Ole Miss can get a playoff bid is to win the rest of its football games, which doesn’t seem likely. Stranger things have happened, but I would say, as far as I can tell, Ole Miss hasn’t congealed as a team. It doens’t have that spark of greatness that the great teams find. I was looking for that to happen this season, but it just isn’t there.