This Remarkably Enthusiastic NAIA College Basketball Crowd May Have Just Solved The Fake Injury/Flopping Epidemic
That is a remarkably excitable crowd for an NAIA basketball game. There are D-1 NCAA schools who haven't had 10 students that into one of their basketball games in years. Dillard University doesn't have a large crowd, but boy are they effective. They're hostile. They do a lot with a little. If I had to shoot one pressure free throw for a million dollars, I would sooner do it in a loud sold out Big Ten arena than in front of those 10-15 Dillard Basketball enthusiasts.
You can tune out a sell-out crowd. You can't tune out these grown men rolling around on the floor 15-feet away from you in a small gym. You can hear every word they say. You're able to put voices to faces. By the first timeout, they've found your Instagram. By halftime they've identified your ex-girlfriend. Next thing you know, they've somehow got her phone number and have her on FaceTime as you're bricking your 7th straight three-pointer. If you're having an off night, a small faction of involved fans in a 500-person capacity gym will make your night hell.
But that's beside the point. For years, sports have been wrestling with what to do about fake injuries and flopping. Football and basketball have it the worst. And nothing the powers-at-be do to prevent it ever really works. Fake injuries are too hard to identify with 100% certainty. I mean, what does going down with a cramp look like? Even the real ones happen out of nowhere. In football, every now and then a ref will make the call and charge a timeout. The SEC has taken to fining schools $50k if they're caught faking injuries to slow down a game. But how many SEC coaches are thinking about $50k and a "public reprimand" when it's late in the game and their exhausted defense desperately needs a breather?
Just tell your AD to take the money out of your eventual $30M buyout and get on with the season.
Unfortunately, with the way a football field is set up, I don't think a small number of students will ever be able to bully players out of faking an injury. But in basketball… this could work. If the NBA hired a group of 10-20 rambunctious young black men to sit courtside at games for the soul purpose of aggressively clowning any player who fakes an injury (or flops on his way to the hoop)… we might actually see some results.
The NBA already gives technical fouls for flopping (allegedly), but clearly that isn't helping much. Every Oklahoma City Thunder game sends Twitter into a rage as they're forced to watch a Shai Gilgeous-Alexander parade to the free throw line. Nobody likes it when a basketball game turns into a free throw contest. But SGA doesn't care about that. At best, he maybe sees some people making fun of him post-game and feels a tinge of embarrassment for a grand total of 3 seconds. But by the time his next game rolls around, he's going to go back to the well and do whatever's necessary to win.
But what if we took NBA Twitter, and sat them courtside…
If NBA players were forced to face those guys every time they flopped their way into a bullshit foul… that actually seems like a pretty fair trade-off. If they're going to play basketball in a way that everyone hates, then maybe they should be ridiculed for it. In real time. To their face.
NBA players make too much money for monetary fines to ever change their ways. NBA refs have long since proven they're incapable of identifying a flop. At this point, some good ol' fashioned courtside bullying might be our best option. I'm sure the mentally tough floppers wouldn't let it bother them too much. But it might make some players think twice about playing "unethical hoops". Even if the LeMoyne-Owen College player in that video wasn't faking his injury on that missed dunk (yeah right), I bet he thinks twice about letting his injury show next time. And that's the type of mentality athletes could use a little more of these days.