A nice piece by Dayn Perry in the Chicago Sports review addresses the NFL's stance on steroid and drug cheats: soft.
As pointed out by many writers, baseball and many sports remain under tight scrutiny for anabolic use. Evidence for this includes the moral hand-wringing seen at the Hall of Fame voting for Mark McGwire, and now the emerging tempest over the soon-to-be Barry Bonds passing of Hank Aaron's career home ruin mark.
In track, if an athlete is caught cheating, or even implicated in drug use (as with Tim Montgomery), or misses testing dates, he/she loses world records, and is barred from competition for years.
One gets the impression that had Floyd Landis been treated like an NFL linebacker, he would have had to give the other riders a 10 minute head start the next day, then zip off to win the race.
Whereas a MLB player loses 50 games (about 30% of the season, but 2 months) on his first anabolic offense, an NFL player loses 4 games (25% of the season and one month).
Major NFL offenders who cheat are not penalized. Players from the Carolina Panthers received anabolic prescriptions one week before the 2004 Superbowl No penalty given.
NFL brass even mistate facts, stating that there are no reliable tests for HGH (a major NFL anabolic) which is quite inaccurate.
If the NFL were serious about stopping anabolic use, it would not only beef up dope testing, but would move to punish dopers. For instance, the 2004 Superbowl in which there is clear and unequivocal evidence that Carolina player doped, could be used as an model. A good start toward indicating it's seriousness would be for the NFL either to retro-actively strip Carolina's participation in the game, or to indicate that any such occurrence in the future would strip players and teams of honors garnered in the post-season.
The NFL suffers from on-going anabolic abuse, the games and the post-season honors are compromised, and former players are suffering medical complications that arguably are from anabolic use. When will the NFL recognize and confront the problems?
(excerpts from Chicago Sports after the jump)
From the Chicago Sports Review:
In this the "Steroids Era" of sport, you may have noticed a curious phenomenon: the NFL has been spared most of the outrage.
Baseball certainly has its share...
QUESTION OF SURVIVAL
Because of baseball's leisurely pace and prevailing lack of violence, observers see the use of steroids as a corruption of the native merits. It's not a sport of violent collisions (although catchers would argue this point), and it's not a sport in which brute force carries the day. Football, obviously, is quite different. It's a game of hard hits, concussed quarterbacks, broken bones, missing teeth, gnarled faces, blood, guts, viscera and all the rest of it. Because of these workaday terrors, it's hard to blame football players for doing something-anything-in the service of survival. The use of steroids better squares with what we believe about the game. In part, it's this perception that makes steroids such a serious and overlooked problem in football.
The League itself is also content to ignore the epidemic. In track and field, for instance, violators are stripped of their records and banned for years at a time. In baseball, an initial offense gets you a 50-game suspension, which amounts to more than 30% of the regular season. In the NFL, however, first-time offenders are suspended for only four games, or just 25% of the regular season. And those out-of-work sprinters? They often get tryouts with NFL teams or their subsidiaries in Europe. That's precisely what happened with Justin Gatlin and Dwain Chambers. So not only are the policies lax, but the NFL will also provide sanctuary to excommunicated cheats from other sports.
There's also the NFL's seemingly willful ignorance of emergent science. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell not long ago renegotiated the league's drug policy with the Players Association. However, conspicuously absent in the policy was a testing program for human growth hormone (HGH). Goodell parried the criticisms by saying there wasn't a reliable test for HGH available.
However, Dr. Gary Wadler, who's a physician and a high-ranking committee member for the World Anti-Doping Agency, disputed Goodell's claim. "The fact of the matter is that there is a test," Wadler told USA Today. "There are several tests."
As well, Travis Tygart, chief counsel for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, pointed out that there's now a peer-reviewed blood test for HGH. "For someone to say that there is not an effective test that could be used within the near future is simply inaccurate," he said.
Then there's the matter of whether the NFL's skeleton of a policy works in the first place. Roughly 60 players have been suspended since the NFL began disciplining drug users 1989. That's not many, and the numbers raise the suspicion that the league isn't terribly serious about all of this. The other, larger shoe dropped last year.
DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL
In August, the Charlotte Observer reported that six members of the Charlotte Panthers team that went to the Super Bowl in 2004 had received multiple refillable steroid prescriptions. Subsequent court documents revealed two more names to the list. The players, which included three starting offensive linemen, avoided detection by the NFL for years. In fact, two of the linemen-Todd Steussie and Louis Williams-received prescriptions for five banned substances less than a week before the team's Super Bowl loss to the New England Patriots. In the sentencing phase of the prescribing doctor's criminal trial, U.S. Attorney Winston Holliday said the players considered the league's testing efforts "almost a joke."
The primary upshot of the players' cheating and the league's prevarications is a lack of competitive integrity on the field. Off the field, however, the culture of drug use may be exacting a grimmer toll. Many retired football players suffer shortened life spans and endure intense pain as a result of their playing days. The bone-on-bone nature of the sport is certainly to blame, but the widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs likely also plays a role. Many of the familiar maladies suffered by football players-enlarged hearts, joint pain, back problems-are also associated with steroid abuse.
The NFL doesn't make earnest efforts to end steroid abuse, and indeed the low-grade "Social Darwinism" of the scouting combines and training camps, which demand that players be ever faster and stronger, encourages taking such unsavory steps. Then, of course, the league leaves these players to their own devices after five years of retirement. That's not an acceptable state of affairs.
It's undeniable that both sides have incentive to use these drugs. The NFL wants its stars' performances to be ever-more astounding, and the players want the riches that come along with on-field excellence. The use of performance enhancers helps both aims. What's not acceptable is that some players who perhaps otherwise wouldn't dream of compromising their health in such a manner then feel pressure to "juice" in order to keep up with the player who indulges with no such reservations. It's a coercive pressure.
So really the only way the NFL and the players are going to take the needed steps is if the fans and the media ramp up the outrage. Baseball's acts of contrition are owing to, in no small part, public pressure. That's what's needed with regard to the NFL.
It's time for all of us to turn our oh-so-steely gaze on the NFL and impart to them the need for change.
Excellent commentary on the NFL. It appears as if the shit is slowly starting to the hit that fan. I recently read an interesting article on ESPN.com stating that the NFL may be close to "jumping the shark." Could be.
As the article states, steroids are going to be a big problem moving forward, as will the health problems of former players and possible overexposure of the league. The thing is, when one of these issues truly hits the fan, the others will surely follow.
Roger Goodell needs to start coming up with some solid solutions to some real problems. Perhaps Tagliabue didn't leave the league in quite as good a shape as people initially thought...
Jock Jarrelson
Flash Sports Tonight
http://www.flashsportstonight.com
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