The Art of Stumbling in College Football

The man who was dancing loved to dance all the time.
But he couldn’t do it right no matter how hard he tried.
He had two left feet as a result of an accident during childbirth.
Every time he dances, he always falls face first.
Then one day when he jumped in the air
Everyone turned and looked and pointed and stared.
He had a brilliant idea, right before he fell to the ground.
“Everyone is failing!” he shouted.
A new dance craze is born!

Do, do, do fail!
Do, do, do fail!
Everyone fails!

“Everybody Fails” – LilDeuceDeuce

Alonza Barnett III wasn’t trying to break the Internet over Labor Day weekend. The James Madison quarterback was trying to convince everyone he broke something — an arm? a sternum? a soul? Who cares? — in the Dukes’ season opener against Charlotte. What kind of break would it take to earn an unsportsmanlike penalty against a 49ers defender who had just shoved him in the chest with his hands?

Yes, there was a flag on the play. And yes, the first flag, thrown by the center referee who saw Barnett fall to the ground, was thrown in the direction of San Francisco 49ers defensive lineman Dre Butler, who was pushing the ball. Then there were two flags on the play, with another yellow card shown to the man pushing the ball: James Madison’s No. 14 and the rookie No. 1. Why?

“I think one lap and one little thing might be good,” James Morse coach Bob Chesney said of his player’s fall.

Yes, Barnett did much more than that.

JMU quarterback Alonza Barnett III with early season failure 😅 pic.twitter.com/SoRTkCBWHH

— ESPN College Football (@ESPNCFB) September 1, 2024

The clip has racked up more than 10 million views on ESPN College Football X alone. Barnett said his phone went into a tailspin and stayed that way for days, with friends and strangers alike tagging him in their retweets and texting him about it, as if he hadn’t seen it. As he settled into his midweek public speaking class, a professor flashed the clip onto the class’s video screen as an example of overdoing it.

“I realized, ‘Man, this is going to go on for a while,'” Barnett told the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

It seems to be the case. Every weekend of the 2024 college football season, which is still in its infancy, has produced at least one such social media failure, either to cast doubt on opposing teams’ ability to win or to slow down those same opposing teams in this era of high-powered offenses.

He plays

‘This is bad acting’: UNLV player appears to fake injury before playing third down

Antonio Doyle Jr. appeared to feign injury and get back on his feet before playing third down against Kansas.

The latter is still relatively new; it’s only been a year since the NCAA implemented review and appeal rules designed to curb planned crashes by perfectly healthy young athletes seeking nothing more than to stop the clock and disrupt the rhythm of a fast-paced march to the end zone.

“It’s an integrity issue,” said Steve Shaw, the NCAA’s national referee coordinator. He said the review rules have certainly reduced the incidence of foul play, but they’re far from eliminating it. “It’s not really the lesson we want from this sport that we all love,” he said. “Even if it sounds funny, the motivation behind it, in these cases, is certainly not funny. The process is new and it can be difficult to enforce, but the effort is underway. It has to be done.”

Everybody hates it. Everybody. Even the ones who had players do it. See: Kevin, Lynn.

“There has to be some consequences,” said the Ole Miss coach, who built his career on engineering powerful offenses.

Although he calls for discipline, Kevin admitted that some players have made mistakes in the same way that has frustrated him over the years.

“We have the opportunity to review the film now and appeal it to the conference,” Kevin said. “If the coaches are really willing to go ahead with it and it’s really done and it’s ruled a clear fake injury, then there’s a real penalty or fine, I can guarantee you it will go away exactly as it came out.”

The first method—the slam dunk, the boundless slam dunk, the conscious collapse in an attempt to act on the winning path—has been around since oblong leather balls have been carried up and down football fields or since LeBron James has been playing basketball.

“Fall, as a verb, formally means “to fall or bend suddenly, especially with a noise; to fall or spin with a sudden shock or sound” (“The puppy fell on the couch.“)” But a deeper dive into the bottom half of Dictionary.com’s “Failure” page reveals the sporting meaning, which is found in the fifth iteration of the noun: “An exaggerated or dramatic fall intended to convince officials to punish the opposing team for a mistake.”His ridiculous failure did not fool the judges at all.)”

Even the dictionary wasn’t fooled by the false fall? So why do we keep doing it?

He hit the net after the flag 😂

FSU’s TJ Ferguson received an unnecessary roughness penalty in this game. pic.twitter.com/bSjK90TwfR

— ESPN College Football (@ESPNCFB) September 3, 2024

“Why don’t you do it?” said Roman Harper, a former Alabama safety turned Super Bowl champion turned SEC Network analyst. He was standing at the Gainesville, Fla., airport watching Barnett fail for the first time, and he couldn’t stop laughing. Then he couldn’t stop criticizing.

“People are going to focus on the loss, and they should. But the problem is the linebacker allowed himself to get caught in that push,” Harper said. “That’s real talent, to get that guy to do that. It was probably the second hit of the scrimmage and it happened while the referee was looking. The quarterback did his job. It was over. And then he did too much after that. Too much.”

How far can we go? Let’s put it to experts not in the field, but in the relevant areas of expertise.

WWE Hall of Famer and legendary Rock ‘n’ Roll Express member Ricky Morton was so adept at selling pain to audiences that he became known throughout the industry as “Playing Ricky Morton.” His line: “This fail is a 10/10.”

Okay, maybe it was Starrcade or the Great American Bash. But what about football? Let’s take it to someone who knows both: Brock Anderson, former high school linebacker, MLB wrestling star and son of WWE Hall of Famer Arn Anderson. “It was inexcusable even by pro wrestling standards,” he said. “If he had broken a bump right off the push, he would have gotten the 15-yard penalty and maybe even (got) the guy ejected, which would have been diabolical.”

But then, as any wrestler will tell you, the linemen can either lift you up or bring you down. “After their lineman hit them with CPR, they should have been making up for the penalties.”

And so it was.

For those of you who’ve never spent time in a uniform over a pulled-on square of cloth or glued to a Sunday night pay-per-view, the surprise hit is the chef’s kiss of the rip, a quick backwards fall straight onto the shoulders with the legs bent enough in the air to convince the viewer that one has clearly been accidentally cut down like a sequoia tree.

“That’s the key here. Land on the meat of their upper back, between the shoulder blades, and then slam their butt into the ground…”

This explanation/addition/training doesn’t come from a football player or a wrestler. No, she’s much more powerful than that. This is Jane Austen, co-founder of Hollywood Stunt Works, a stunt coordinator and performer with a long list of credits spanning more than four decades, from 1980s staples “Airwolf” and “China Beach” to “Thor: Love and Thunder” and the “Avatar” sequel.

Remember Terry Tate: The Office Midfielder, the greatest football-themed TV commercial of all time? Remember the woman who cleaned her watch while standing in the office hallway with a stack of files? That woman was Austin, and she had a concussion. So yeah, she knows how to sell herself on a fake football shot.

After receiving the video that Barnett had captured at James Madison University, Austin spent a full 24 hours examining the moment. Once she was done laughing, she carefully analyzed his artificial illness.

“My coaching advice is to come down hard, come down as hard as you can, and don’t do any dramatic moves. Just lay there. Then give yourself a chance. Or if you have to move, roll over onto your side. Stay on the ground no matter what, if you really want to capitalize on it and try to make science out of it. You have to give your audience, in this case the referee, a moment to think, ‘Man, that was awful.’ So all this other stuff, the jump up, the second roll, the lineman doing CPR, in my work I liken that to falling down the stairs, where you’re going down the stairs. You do all these moves and when you get to the landing, your momentum is gone, but you have to force yourself down the rest of the stairs, right? Turn around and go down. Keep going. Force yourself to do what this guy just did, don’t stop on the landing. Just stay on the ground, man.”

When asked about the finer points of taking fake punches, sometimes from a fellow actor who never gets closer than 4 or 5 inches to the face, Austin points to “John Wick” and “Indiana Jones” and watching fake fight movies the same way football players watch movies of a game. It’s more about body reactions than facial expressions, she says, a useful tip when you’re wearing a helmet. It’s about exaggerated body movement, but not overly fast movements. Instead, she explains, great stuntmen actually move a little slower than they would in a real fight. And you always have to know where the camera is. Or, in this case, the guys in black-and-white striped overalls with whistles around their necks and yellow flags on their belts.

In fact, it seems like a lot. And it seems incredibly difficult to master. So how can a college football player who is not classically trained pull off penalty kills so easily, in the vast world of failure?

The same way anyone can get into Carnegie Hall or the college football playoffs.

“Practice, practice, practice,” she said, laughing but also seriously. “Visualize yourself, just like you would in football practice, or look in the mirror. Get some crash pads or a mattress, some pillows from the couch, and have someone push you over and over. Land on your side, land on your back. Find what looks best. Study the pros. Watch NFL players fail. Watch good football movies. Mimic it. ‘Longest yard.’ ‘College blues.’ These are the professional stunts or stunt falls that look very real in football.”

In other words, watch Team Austin. Watch Team Morton. Watch Team Anderson. And maybe, with some proper training, we’ll see Barnett walk from the red carpet at Armed Forces Stadium to an Emmy, Oscar or Golden Globe to accept an acting award. Football players have been teaching Hollywood how to throw and catch a ball properly since Harold Lloyd starred in “The Freshman” in 1925. Is it time to turn the script on its head?

“Who knows?” Austin said. “Maybe if I get tired of bumping into things for a living, there’ll be a future for me in this as a failed football coach. They need that.”