COLUMBIA, Mo. — It’s rare that a new rule in college sports can be called a no-brainer.
Some feel rushed or rash, coming with plenty of unintended consequences. Others feel like — in a metaphor I heard last week and liked — feeble attempts to stuff toothpaste back in the tube.
But for once, a college sports entity looks set to institute the kind of policy that is so obviously necessary it comfortably can be called a no-brainer.
Starting with this football season, the Southeastern Conference is preparing to require teams to provide standardized injury reports before each game, . The initiative stemmed from discussions at the league’s spring meetings and reportedly is quite close to reality.
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Because the point of this rule would be to bring clarity to the muddy world of player availability, it’s important to be abundantly clear about one thing: College football needs this, surely and sorely.
Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz agrees.
“I think it’s a great thing,” Drinkwitz recently said. “We were doing it last year because I think transparency within a program, to try to eliminate the people needing information,” would be beneficial “especially when we’re talking about betting. Obviously, that’s what this is for.”
I wish this were a noble argument about the value of transparency for transparency’s sake. It’s not. It’s about betting and money and information, which is to say that it’s about the new, sometimes sketchy, face of college sports.
Maybe the industry just needs the underbelly to be the driving force of some high-minded change.
The rule is not some overhaul of how coaches or teams operate. Assuming it is put in place, teams will have to make simple designations of players’ statuses using familiar terms such as “out” and “questionable” — maybe “probable” and “doubtful” if there’s room for nuance. The Big Ten already is doing that, and the NFL has been for years.
Drinkwitz’s only gripe is having to release that information each of three days leading up to a game, plus game day itself — so Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday in a typical week. That “seems like a little bit of a to-do list,” he said, though he countered his own complaint with the reality that he’ll turn the task over to someone else.
That four-day format hasn’t been reported, so it’s either new information or something that might be subject to change before the rule is finalized. Regardless, if that’s the biggest complaint a head coach has, it seems like more fuel for the no-brainer label.
Other SEC coaches have fallen in step with Drinkwitz on this, too. Texas’ Steve Sarkisian of having mandated injury reports “because now we don’t have to worry about leaks out of our building, and as it pertains to this new idea of online gambling.”
Alabama’s Kalen DeBoer and said he “get(s) why it could be necessary.”
Here’s a Mizzou-centric example of “why.”
Last year, Drinkwitz and Mizzou largely were consistent with releasing injury reports before games, usually early on Thursday nights. When those releases came, they were official and thus informative for the press and the public.
But there were gaps. Take the Tigers’ game against Tennessee: Whether through oversight or a competitive slight directed at the Vols, no injury report came out that week.
Star MU wideout Luther Burden III’s availability had been in question in the run-up, so his was a name to watch for on the injury report. He probably would have been listed as questionable or probable, not making anything that much more certain, but the reports exist to provide confirmation so those kinds of assumptions aren’t necessary.
Instead, Burden’s status came out in the form of leaks. The day before the game, the recruiting service On3 reported that Burden was “set to play.” Early in the morning of the game, ESPN quoted Drinkwitz as saying Burden was “going to play.”
Sportsbooks responded with confusion. According to the Action Network’s , the price for Burden scoring a touchdown at any point against Tennessee ranged from -185 (a $10 bet pays out $15.41) to +500 (a $10 bet pays out $60).
That’s a big difference and one you could have exploited or been exploited by, depending on what you knew.
In fairness, it could have been a glitch. And to some degree, the risk of placing such a bet is on the bettor — and maybe this anecdote is more about why proposition bets for individual player performances are a bad idea than it is about why mandated injury reports are a good one.
I think it shows a flawed system, one in which the information fueling betting markets could come not from official sources but from anonymous ones. It’s cause for some trepidation in my profession. Like any good reporter, I value getting scoops, but I don’t like to think that they could have that kind of influence — that reporting, or not reporting, some sort of injury news has this kind of financial sway.
So yes, there is an element of this argument that is personal for those of us on a college football beat. Maybe it’s even a little bit selfish of me to advocate for a rule like this. But what we, as reporters, know has value in the sports betting universe. Just ask the sportsbooks.
Just last month, an “odds monitoring and injury alerting” software created by a “pro sports bettor” that “gives sports bettors an advantage” sent me a long note intended to pitch me on providing them with information. They said they were after “clearer and faster information on players at the collegiate level.”
I didn’t entertain the conversation long enough to learn the specifics of what they were asking me to provide or what I’d receive in exchange — I shut them down, of course. The cynic in me assumes they wanted the sort of things we observe or hear of in off-the-record capacities or reportable information before I’d published it anywhere else. I know the same company contacted other journalists on the Mizzou beat, too. I don’t know if anyone agreed to work with them.
That should be cause for concern beyond just our industry, and it’s why the institution of mandated injury reports is so important.
It’s not just me who sees this particular reason. The parts of the sports betting industrial machine that scour beats and locker rooms for information to get ahead of sportsbooks or bettors are on the radar of coaches such as Drinkwitz, too. Add that to the reasons why he’s in favor of the likely new rule.
“If it keeps the shadowy figures out of the locker room,” Drinkwitz said, “I’m all for it.”