The art of tumbling in college football
- Ryan McGee, ESPN Senior WriterSep 20, 2024, 07:00 AM ET Close Senior writer for ESPN The Publication and ESPN.com
- 2-time Sports Emmy winner
- 2010, 2014 NMPA Writer of the Year
“The Do The Flop Guy liked to dance all the time
However he could not do it right no matter how hard he tried
He had 2 left feet from an accident at birth
And every time he danced, he constantly tumbles face first
Then one day as he leapt in the air
Everybody turned and looked and they pointed and they stared
He had an intense idea, right before he hit the flooring
He yelled: “Everyone do the flop!”
A brand-new dance fad was born!Do, do, do the flop!Do, do, do the flop!Everybody do the flop!
“”Everybody do the Flop”
— LilDeuceDeuce Alonza Barnett III wasn’t attempting to break the internet over Labor Day weekend. The James Madison quarterback was trying to persuade everyone that he had broken something– Arm? Breast bone? Spirit? Who cares?– in the Dukes ‘season opener versus Charlotte. Whatever type of break it might take to draw an unsportsmanlike charge against the 49ers defender who had actually simply offered him a two-handed push in the chest.Yes, there was a flag on the play. And yes, the first, tossed by the center judge who saw Barnett fall the ground, was tossed in the direction of Niners protective lineman Dre Butler, the pusher. Then there were two flags on the play, as another yellow was revealed to the pushee: JMU’s No. 14 and brand-new No. 1 thespian. Why? “I believe possibly one roll and one little thing would be good,” JMU head coach Bob Chesney said of his signal-caller’s fall.Yeah, Barnett did way more than that.JMU QB Alonza Barnett III with the early flop of the season pic.twitter.com/SoRTkCBWHH!.?.!— ESPN College Football(@ESPNCFB )September 1, 2024 The clip has more than 10 million views
on the ESPN College Football X account alone.
Barnett said his phone went wild and remained that way for days, as pals and strangers alike kept tagging him on their reposts and kept texting him about it, as if he hadn’t seen it. As he calmed down into midweek presentational speech class, the teacher threw the clip up on the classroom video screen as an example of needlessly overdramatizing one’s presentation.Barnett informed the Richmond Times-Dispatch that was when he realized:”Oh man. This is going to stick for a while. “So, it would seem, is tumbling. Every weekend of this still-young 2024 college football season has actually produced at least one social media experience
of a flop, whether to draw flags against their challengers or to slow those very same opponents down throughout this age of hammer-down offenses.
play 0:36 ‘That’s bad acting ‘: UNLV player appears to fake injury before 3rd-down play Antonio Doyle Jr. appears to fake an injury and gets right back up before a third-down play vs. Kansas.The latter is still reasonably new; it was just oneyear
ago that the NCAA executed evaluation and appeal guidelines developed to suppress choreographed collapses by completely healthy, young athletes looking for nothing more than to stop the clock and disrupt the rhythm of a quick-moving march
towards completion zone.”That is a stability problem, “Steve Shaw, the NCAA nationwide organizer of officials, said. He stated the review guidelines have actually definitely decreased the bog-them-down produced falls, but they’re still far from being removed.”It’s not really the kind of teaching lesson we desire from this sport we all like. Even if it looks funny, the inspiration behind it, certainly in those cases, is not. The procedure is brand-new and it can be difficult to enforce, but the effort is happening now. It has to.”Editor’s Picks 2 Associated Everybody hates that stuff. Everybody. Even those who have actually had players do it. See: Kiffin, Lane.”There needs to be some sort of consequence, “said the Ole Miss coach, who has made a profession out of engineering high-powered offenses.Even as he clamors for discipline, Kiffin has actually admitted to having
a few players take a dive in the exact same way that has actually irritated him for many years. “We have the chance to evaluate movie now and submit an
appeal for review from the conference,” Kiffin said.” If coaches are truly ready to go through with that and it is truly imposed and ruled
to be an apparent faking of an injury, and after that there’s a real penalty or fine, I can ensure you it will disappear much like it showed up.”The former– the OG plop,
the ageless self-toss, the conscious collapse in search of acting one’s way into a beneficial flag– has actually been around as long as leather oblong spheres have been brought up and down football fields. Or soccer balls have actually been kicked down the pitch. Or as long as LeBron James has actually been playing hoops.Flopping, as a verb, formally suggests”to fall or plump down unexpectedly, especially with sound; drop or turn with an abrupt bump or thud(The young puppy tumbled down on the couch.)”But a deep dive into the bottom half of Dictionary.com’s”flop “page exposes the sports significance, found as the 5th iteration of the noun:”An exaggerated or significant fall meant to persuade officials to penalize the opposing team for a foul.(His comically oversold flop didn’t
fool the referees at all. )” Even the dictionary isn’t falling for the synthetic falling? So, why keep doing it?He hit the griddy after the flag FSU’s TJ Ferguson got an unneeded roughness penalty on this play. pic.twitter.com/bSjK90TwfR!.?.!— ESPN College Football(@ESPNCFB) September 3, 2024 “Why would not you?”responded Roman Harper, the former Alabama All-SEC safety-turned-Super Bowl champ-turned SEC Network analyst. Standing in the Gainesville, Florida, airport and watching the Barnett flop for the first time, he can’t stop chuckling.Then he can’t stop critiquing. “People are going to concentrate on the flop, and they should. However the concern is that the defensive lineman let himself get suckered into
that push,”Harper said.”That’s the true skill, to get that guy to do that. It’s most likely the second hit of
the altercation and it occurs just as the ref is looking. The
QB did his job. That was done. Then he did too much after. Way too much.”Just how much of excessive? Let’s take it to the specialists not on the field, but in the fields of associated expertise.Ricky Morton, WWE Hall of Famer as one half of the famous Rock ‘n’ Roll Express tag group, was so great at selling discomfort to audiences that it ended up being known through the market as “playing Ricky Morton. “His text:”That flop is a 10/10.”Well, possibly for Starrcade or the Excellent American Bash. However what about football? Let’s take it to someone who understands both: Brock Anderson, former coveted high school linebacker, East Carolina Pirate, Big league Wrestling star and son of another WWE Hall of Famer in Arn Anderson.”
That was unjustified even by pro wrestling standards. If he would have just snapped off a bump straight off the shove, he would’ve gotten the 15-yard penalty and perhaps even [gotten] the guy ejected, which would have been wicked,”he said.But then, as any wrestler will tell you, the supporting cast can either raise you up or sink you.”After his lineman hit ’em with the CPR, ought to’ve been offsetting penalties. “And it was.For those of you who have never ever hung out in a unitard atop a pulled square of canvas or glued to a Sunday night pay-per-view, a breeze bump is the chef’s kiss of rasslin ‘, a fast fall straight back into the shoulders with simply enough bent legs into the air to persuade the audience that a person plainly has actually simply been unknowingly chopped down like a sequoia.”That’s the key, right there. Landing on the meat of the upper back, between the shoulder blades, and then having their butt struck the ground …”This explanation/addition/coaching is coming not from a football player or wrestler.
No, she’s a hell of lot harder than that. This is Jane Austin, co-founder of Hollywood Stunt Works, a stunt organizer and performer with a list of credits that covers more than four decades, from 1980s TV staples “Airwolf” and “China Beach”to “Thor: Love and Thunder” and the “Avatar “sequels.Remember”Terry Tate: Workplace Linebacker,”aka the best football-themed TV advertising campaign of all time? Remember the
female who had her clock cleaned up as she stood in the office hallway holding a stack of files? That was Austin, and she suffered a concussion
. So, yeah, she knows how to offer the taking of a staged football hit. After receiving the Barnett JMU video, Austin spent a whole 24 hours analyzing the minute. When she was done laughing, she did a nuanced breakdown his synthetic condition.”My training guidance would be, just go down hard, “Austin stated. “Go down as hard as you can, and just do not do any dramatics.
Lay there. Then give it a beat. Or, if you need to move, roll to your side. Stay down, no matter what, if you actually want to capitalize and try to get a flag out of it. You have to provide your audience, in this case the referee, a minute to think,’Oh man, that was dreadful. ‘So, all this other things, the jump up, the second roll, the lineman offering CPR, in my company I ‘d compare this to a stair fall, where you have a landing on the stairs. You do all this action and when you get to the landing, your momentum ends, but you’ve got to make yourself go down the remainder of the stairs, right
? Turn the corner and decrease. Keep it going. Force yourself to do, like, exactly what this guy simply did, do not stop at the landing. Simply keep it on the ground, guy.”When Austin is asked about the finer points of taking phony punches, often a swing from a fellow actor that never ever comes closer than 4 or 5 inches to the face, she describes” John Wick”, “Indiana Jones”and watching phony battle movie the very same way that football players view game film. She states it has to do with body reaction more than facial expression, which is valuable guidance when you’re using helmet. And it’s about exaggerated body movement, but not extremely quick movements. Instead, she discusses, excellent stunt entertainers really move a little bit slower than they would in a real-life battle. And one need to always know where the cam is. Or, in this case, the people dressed in black-and-white stripes with
whistles around their necks and yellow flags on their belts.Honestly, it seems like a lot. It seems really hard to master. So, Austin– who simply spent her summer perilously hanging from aircraft somewhere high above Pandora– how in the large, wide world of flops is a non-classically experienced college football player expected to pull off penalty-pulling pratfalls with the best of ease?The very same method anybody makes it to Carnegie Hall. Or the College Football Playoff.”Practice, practice, practice,”she stated laughing, however also sort of severe.”Film yourself, much like football practice, or look in the mirror. Get some crash pads or a bed mattress, some pillows from the couch, and have somebody shove you over and over. Arrive at your side, arrive on that meat of your back. Discover what looks finest.
And study the pros. Enjoy the NFL guys flop. Enjoy excellent football movies. Mimic that.” The Longest Yard.”” University Blues. “Those are expert stunts or stunt falls that look really real in a football setting.”Simply put, see Austin’s individuals. Watch Morton’s individuals. Watch Anderson’s individuals. With some proper training, perhaps we may see Barnett strolling from the Army Bowl red carpet to the Emmys, Oscars or Golden
Globes to accept an acting award. Hey, football individuals have been teaching Hollywood folks how to correctly toss and catch passes because Harold Lloyd starred in “The Freshman “in 1925. Is it time to flip– and flop– the script?”Who knows?”Austin said. “Perhaps if I get tired of crashing into things for a living, there’s a future in this for me as a football flop coach. They need it. “