New college football rules to charge timeout for fake injury, formally close Oregon 12-men loophole

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New rule changes coming to college football in 2025 include a timeout penalty to stop players from faking injuries, a single timeout for the third overtime and beyond, a codified closing of the 12-men-on-the-field loophole that gained widespread attention during Oregon’s October win over Ohio State, a change to approved kick return signals and a language adjustment to how replay reviews are announced.

The changes were proposed by the football rules committee in February and approved by the NCAA’s Playing Rules Oversight Panel this week.

The new injury timeout rule will cost a team one of its three timeouts per half if a player goes down due to injury after the ball is spotted for the next play and medical personnel enter the field. If a team is out of timeouts, it will incur a 5-yard penalty for delay of game. Faked injuries have become a popular tactic to slow down an offense’s momentum and tempo, and the practice got so much attention that SEC commissioner Greg Sankey sent a letter to member schools last fall about the issue. The rules committee said the most egregious violations have occurred in the period after the ball is spotted for the next play.

“We looked at a lot of video on these and saw many are occurring not at the end of the play, but after the play,” NCAA coordinator of officials Steve Shaw said in February. “So we think this will hit and take the incentive for a player to feign an injury after a play is over. We’ll monitor and see how it goes.”

Shaw said the rule would not apply to players who were limping or struggling to get to the next play before going down. It’s meant to be applied to players who quickly drop to the field in an egregious act.

It’s a less dramatic change than the proposal brought by the American Football Coaches Association, which asked that any player who went down for injury be required to sit out the rest of the drive. The concern with that proposal was that players who were actually injured would try to play through it.

Other changes

• The change to timeout allotment during overtime comes after several games last season went to five or more extra frames. Most notably, the Georgia-Georgia Tech game on Thanksgiving weekend went eight overtimes and saw three timeouts called over the final five two-play overtime periods, creating a basketball-like finish with excessive stoppages.
• If a defense goes through a play in the final two minutes with 12 players, it will be a 5-yard penalty, and the offense will have the option to reset the game clock. This is the codified resolution to Oregon fielding 12 players on the second-to-last play of its game against Ohio State in October, running four seconds off the clock for the small price of a 5-yard penalty. If the 12th player is attempting to leave the field at the time of the snap, the defense will only receive a 5-yard penalty. This codifies the rule change interpretation added after the game last fall.
• The “T” arm signal on kick returns will now lead to a dead ball call. This came up in this winter’s Citrus Bowl when South Carolina ran a kick return trick play against Illinois after a Gamecocks player made the “T” signal, an informal signal often used by returners to notify his teammates to let the kickoff go through the end zone. When Illinois coach Bret Bielema walked onto the field to check on an injured Illini player a few plays later, he gave a “T” signal to South Carolina’s bench, leading to a fiery exchange between Bielema and Gamecocks coach Shane Beamer.
• Officials’ announcements of rulings that have been upheld on replay review will no longer differentiate between calls that are “confirmed” or “stand,” hinting at how confident the officials were in the original call. Instead, they will just be “upheld.” The rules committee’s explanation for this was that using different words for an upheld call were confusing for some fans.
• In addition, helmet communication will be allowed in the Football Championship Subdivision after it was introduced in the Football Bowl Subdivision last year.

There were no new rules proposals around targeting, coach challenges or substitutions, but all those areas will get more attention from the rules committee over the next year. Targeting penalties and stoppages often draw the ire of fans for perceived inconsistency in the calls, but Shaw said there were 0.14 targeting penalties enforced per game this season, the lowest average since the rule went into place.

(Photo: Tom Hauck / Getty Images)

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