'That's the true talent': How aiming for a flag got so dramatic in college football

“The Do The Flop Guy liked to dance all the time
But he couldn’t do it right no matter how hard he tried
He had two left feet from an accident at birth
And every time he danced, he always flops face first
Then one day as he jumped in the air
Everybody turned and looked and they pointed and they stared
He had a bright idea, right before he hit the floor
He shouted: “Everybody do the flop!”
A new dance craze 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 trying to break the internet over Labor Day weekend. The James Madison quarterback was trying to convince everyone that he had broken something — Arm? Sternum? Spirit? Who cares? — in the Dukes’ season opener against Charlotte. Whatever kind of break it might take to draw an unsportsmanlike penalty against the 49ers defender who’d just given him a two-handed shove in the chest.

Yes, there was a flag on the play. And yes, the first, thrown by the center judge who saw Barnett fall the ground, was tossed in the direction of Niners defensive lineman Dre Butler, the pusher. Then there were two flags on the play, as another yellow was shown to the pushee: JMU’s No. 14 and new No. 1 thespian. Why?

“I think maybe 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 stayed that way for days, as friends and strangers alike kept tagging him on their reposts and kept texting him about it, as if he hadn’t seen it. As he settled down into midweek presentational speech class, the professor threw the clip up on the classroom video screen as an example of unnecessarily overdramatizing one’s presentation.

Barnett told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that was when he realized: “Oh man. This is going to stick for a while.”

So, it would seem, is flopping. Every weekend of this still-young 2024 college football season has produced at least one social media sensation of a flop, whether to draw flags against their opponents or to slow those same opponents down during this age of hammer-down offenses.

The latter is still relatively new; it was just one year ago that the NCAA implemented review and appeal rules designed to curb choreographed collapses by perfectly healthy, young athletes seeking nothing more than to stop the clock and disrupt the rhythm of a quick-moving march toward the end zone.

“That is an integrity issue,” Steve Shaw, the NCAA national coordinator of officials, said. He said the review regulations have certainly decreased the bog-them-down fabricated falls, but they’re still far from being eliminated. “It’s not really the kind of teaching lesson we want from this sport we all love. Even if it looks funny, the motivation behind it, certainly in those cases, is not. The process is new and it can be difficult to enforce, but the effort is happening now. It has to.”

Everyone hates that stuff. Everyone. Even those who have had players do it. See: Kiffin, Lane.

“There has to be some sort of consequence,” said the Ole Miss coach, who has made a career out of engineering high-powered offenses.

Even as he clamors for discipline, Kiffin has admitted to having a few players take a dive in the same manner that has frustrated him over the years.

“We have the opportunity to review film now and file an appeal for review from the conference,” Kiffin said. “If coaches are really willing to go through with that and it is really enforced and ruled to be an obvious faking of an injury, and then there’s a real penalty or fine, I can guarantee you it will go away just like it showed up.”

The former — the OG plop, the timeless self-toss, the conscious collapse in search of acting one’s way into a favorable flag — has been around as long as leather oblong spheres have been carried up and down football fields. Or soccer balls have been kicked down the pitch. Or as long as LeBron James has been playing hoops.

Flopping, as a verb, officially means “to fall or plump down suddenly, especially with noise; drop or turn with a sudden bump or thud (The puppy flopped down on the couch.)” But a deep dive into the bottom half of Dictionary.com’s “flop” page reveals the sports meaning, found as the fifth iteration of the noun: “An exaggerated or dramatic fall intended 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 faux falling? So, why keep doing it?

He hit the griddy after the flag 😂

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

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

“Why wouldn’t you?” replied 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 laughing. Then he can’t stop critiquing.

“People are going to focus on the flop, and they should. But the issue is that the defensive lineman let himself get suckered into that shove,” Harper said. “That’s the true talent, to get that guy to do that. It’s probably the second hit of the altercation and it happens just as the ref is looking. The QB did his job. That was done. Then he did too much after. Way too much.”

How much of too much? Let’s take it to the experts not on the field, but in the fields of related expertise.

Ricky Morton, WWE Hall of Famer as one half of the legendary Rock ‘n’ Roll Express tag team, was so great at selling pain to audiences that it became known through the industry as “playing Ricky Morton.” His text: “That flop is a 10/10.”

Well, maybe for Starrcade or the Great American Bash. But what about football? Let’s take it to someone who knows both: Brock Anderson, former coveted high school linebacker, East Carolina Pirate, Major League Wrestling star and son of another WWE Hall of Famer in Arn Anderson. “That was gratuitous even by pro wrestling standards. If he would have just snapped off a bump right off the shove, he would’ve gotten the 15-yard penalty and maybe even [gotten] the guy ejected, which would have been diabolical,” 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, should’ve been offsetting penalties.”

And it was.

For those of you who have never spent time in a unitard atop a pulled square of canvas or glued to a Sunday night pay-per-view, a snap bump is the chef’s kiss of rasslin’, a quick fall straight back into the shoulders with just enough bent legs into the air to convince the viewer that one clearly has just been unwittingly 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 hit the ground… “

This explanation/addition/coaching is coming not from a football player or wrestler. No, she’s a hell of lot tougher than that. This is Jane Austin, co-founder of Hollywood Stunt Works, a stunt coordinator and performer with a list of credits that spans more than four decades, from 1980s TV staples “Airwolf” and “China Beach” to “Thor: Love and Thunder” and the “Avatar” sequels.

Remember “Terry Tate: Office Linebacker,” aka the greatest football-themed TV ad campaign of all time? Remember the woman who had her clock cleaned 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 sell the taking of a staged football hit.

After receiving the Barnett JMU video, Austin spent an entire 24 hours examining the moment. Once she was done laughing, she did a nuanced breakdown his artificial affliction.

“My coaching advice would be, just go down hard,” Austin said. “Go down as hard as you can, and just don’t do any dramatics. Lay there. Then give it a beat. Or, if you have to move, roll to your side. Stay down, no matter what, if you really want to take advantage and try to get a flag out of it. You have to give your audience, in this case the referee, a moment to think, ‘Oh man, that was horrible.’ So, all this other stuff, the jump up, the second roll, the lineman giving CPR, in my business 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 rest of the stairs, right? Turn the corner and go down. Keep it going. Force yourself to do, like, exactly what this guy just did, don’t stop at the landing. Just keep it on the ground, man.”

When Austin is asked about the finer points of taking fake punches, sometimes a swing from a fellow actor that never comes closer than 4 or 5 inches to the face, she refers to “John Wick”, “Indiana Jones” and watching fake fight film the same way that football players watch game film. She says it’s about body reaction more than facial expression, which is helpful advice when you’re wearing helmet. And it’s about exaggerated body movement, but not overly quick movements. Instead, she explains, great stunt performers actually move a tiny bit slower than they would in a real-life fight. And one should always know where the camera 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 sounds like a lot. It seems very difficult to master. So, Austin — who just spent her summer perilously hanging from aircraft somewhere high above Pandora — how in the wide, wide world of flops is a non-classically trained college football player supposed to pull off penalty-pulling pratfalls with the greatest of ease?

The same way anyone makes it to Carnegie Hall. Or the College Football Playoff.

“Practice, practice, practice,” she said chuckling, but also sort of serious. “Film yourself, just like football practice, or look in the mirror. Get some crash pads or a mattress, some pillows from the couch, and have somebody shove you over and over. Land on your side, land on that meat of your back. Find what looks best. And study the pros. Watch the NFL guys flop. Watch good football movies. Imitate that. “The Longest Yard.” “Varsity Blues.” Those are professional stunts or stunt falls that look very real in a football setting.”

In other words, watch Austin’s people. Watch Morton’s people. Watch Anderson’s people. With some proper training, perhaps we might see Barnett walking from the Armed Forces Bowl red carpet to the Emmys, Oscars or Golden Globes to accept an acting award. Hey, football people have been teaching Hollywood folks how to properly throw and catch passes since Harold Lloyd starred in “The Freshman” in 1925. Is it time to flip — and flop — the script?

“Who knows?” Austin said. “Maybe if I get tired of crashing into stuff for a living, there’s a future in this for me as a football flop coach. They need it.”