At last week’s Southeastern Conference spring meetings, outgoing SEC commissioner Mike Slive announced that the conference had passed a regulation requiring an independent medical observer for all SEC and home non-conference football games beginning this fall.
“This will give us another check in the event that, on the field, a team doesn’t see someone who may have had a head injury and needs to come off the field,” Slive told reporters. “Most of the time, the sideline picks up those kinds of things. But, just in case they don’t, we are doing everything we can to protect the health and safety of our student athletes.”
Greg Sankey, Slive’s successor, noted that a few SEC schools already had independent medical observers present last year, per Natalie Pierre of AL.com. “We broadened that to make it consistent across the league,” he said.