College football might get mandatory injury reports. It’s probably for the best.

The NCAA doesn’t require teams to release injury reports. Individual conferences are free to make their own rules, and for years, the ACC has required teams to put out NFL-style reports before conference games. But the league is nixing that requirement for 2018, joining the other Power 5 leagues in not requiring anything.

Big Ten athletic directors are asking the NCAA to make injury reports a requirement for everybody. The Big Ten’s rationale is that, now that the Supreme Court has allowed states to legalize sports betting, injury reports are important to maintaining the integrity of the game.

The theory goes that if injury information is trafficked only in small circles, the people with that knowledge could use it to gain a betting advantage (even if that flies in the face of school or conference rules). Conferences don’t like that, because that information could then be sold, and people with access to it might be likelier to bet on or against their teams. The commissioners for the SEC and Big 12 think these reports are coming in some form.

The NFL’s policy on injury reporting is rigorous. Teams have to admit when players are limited in practice, declare where they’re injured, and release (theoretically) honest assessments of how likely it is that players will participate in games.

What the NCAA or its conferences might settle on, if anything, isn’t clear. But injury reporting in any form would change the sport.

“Whatever weaknesses or vulnerabilities that we have as a team, I can’t possibly fathom why I would have any interest in revealing that to my opponent,” Washington State coach Mike Leach told USA Today. That’s how many coaches feel about the issue.

Coaches routinely decline to talk about injuries when reporters ask. An amusing thing is to Google the phrase “we don’t talk about injuries” in quotes and see how many of the top results are for different college football coaches. (It’s almost all of them.)

The potential harm is obvious and serious: If a team discloses that a running back has a hand injury, a defensive coordinator could tell his players to use their helmets to hit the kid in the hand. Players could have vulnerable body parts targeted — not that such things can’t happen now, even in the absence of injury reports.

The NHL has tried to get around that fear by only requiring teams to describe injuries as “upper-body” and “lower-body.” It’s a fair thing to worry about.

On another hand, injury reports could make it a little harder for coaches to conceal injuries that players shouldn’t play through, then pressure them to do it anyway. Exactly what difference injury reports would make in this area depends on how they’re structured.

Players might also benefit during the NFL draft process. If a player had a bad game because he wasn’t fully healthy, he could explain that to pro teams, and they wouldn’t have to take his word for it. He could point directly to a line on the injury report.

The NCAA, schools, and conferences would have to take care not to break privacy laws designed to protect students and patients. UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero has warned that “if you don’t get 100 percent of your players willing to allow you to do it,” injury reports could create legal issues. Decision-makers would have to figure out a way to stay compliant.

Players are the most important constituency, but these groups would be happy:

But embracing them would take the sport forward more than it would move it backward, as long as they’re implemented thoughtfully.