SEC officially institutes mandatory injury reports for conference games

Now official.

The Southeastern Conference has officially instituted a mandatory injury report rule across the top three major sports. Football, baseball and basketball teams will each now have to file a report ahead of every conference game.

For football, this report will come out on Wednesday. It will be updated daily ahead of game day and the final update will be released 90 minutes before kickoff. For basketball and baseball, the report will be due the night before.

Here are the designations available, per the SEC’s release.

Under the reporting structure, prior to game day, student-athletes will be designated as “available,” “probable,” “questionable,” “doubtful,” or “out” for their next game. To provide additional clarity on game day, student-athletes will be designated as “available,” “game time decision,” or “out” for the upcoming game.

“This availability reporting policy is intended to reduce pressure from outside entities seeking participation information and represents a commitment of our 16 institutions to provide enhanced transparency to support efforts to protect our student-athletes and the integrity of competition,” SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey said in the release.

In other words — “outside entity” = the gambling industry. The rule follows the Big 10, which made injury reports mandatory last season.

From our perspective, it’s going to be nice to not have to play the guessing game every week. Coaches had no incentive to give information away, but now they face fines ranging from $15,000 to $100,000 for failure to report accurate information.

Tennessee’s first injury report will come out ahead of their September 21st meeting at Oklahoma.