Mark Cuban to Fund 18-Month Study at SMU on Flopping

When you are a filthy rich dude--one that is rich enough to own a basketball team and not care about paying millions in fines for talking too much--you can do what you want.

Mark Cuban is just such a guy.

The outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks has announced that he will be donating $100,000 to SMU in order to fund a study on flopping.

Oh yeah! This is how we roll!

The grant was awarded by Cuban's Radical Hoops Ltd. to SMU to "carry out a scientific study of the unsavory practice of player flopping in basketball and other sports."

“The issues of collisional forces, balance and control in these types of athletic settings are largely uninvestigated,” said SMU biomechanics expert Peter G. Weyand. “There has been a lot of research into balance and falls in the elderly, but relatively little on active adults and athletes.”

Flopping has been a popular topic of conversation throughout the post season, especially in the Eastern Conference Finals. LeBron James called it strategic, claimed he never does it, but then did it and was fined. He was not alone though, and that has got the commissioner talking about increasing the penalty on floppers to get them to quite.

Well, if anything comes from the study that the bio-mechanics department at SMU is going to conduct now thanks to Cuban maybe the NBA can figure something out.

What exactly they hope to figure out here remains to be seen. Weyand has talked about trying to figure out the necessary amount of force to actually knock someone off balance, but how is knowing that going to help?

Are players going to start wearing jerseys with sensors built in to measure the force applied so that refs can know if it was a flop or a charge? Are there going to have to be scientists on hand at every game to monitor the equipment?

Who knows, but the process of finding out sounds like it could be interesting--or entertaining--to say the least.