ESPN: December 28, 2012 ….But the AP report, which passed largely without comment this past week, is a strangely interesting look at a potentially significant problem. When a handful of 20-year-old linemen pack on 50-75 pounds in the course of a year, there’s at least the appearance of a PED problem in college football. There are, of course, many plausible explanations for this. Some players come from backgrounds where food isn’t as plentiful as it is in college; coaches recruit large-framed kids who are expected to fill out over the years; strength and conditioning programs are far more advanced in the worst Division I program than in the best high school. Plus, kids are still developing in college; it’s not as if they tacked on 30 pounds of lean muscle and two hat sizes at age 36…
But it’s clear from the AP’s work that college football players are pretty much free to use steroids without fear of discovery or penalty. That’s the main takeaway, and the widespread shrug it elicited could be indicative of a general fatigue when it comes to the issue. Or it could be this: People who care about sports have a strange, conflicted relationship with the issue of performance-enhancing drugs. It breaks down by sport: A great number of fans are hysterical scolds when it comes to PEDs in baseball, enablers when it comes to football…
The AP’s look at college football players seems tangentially related to the lack of journalistic scrutiny afforded baseball’s steroid problem in the heyday of McGwire-Sosa-Bonds-Palmeiro-etc. There was so much self-flagellation in the baseball-writing community (it’s a little suburb outside Detroit where everyone wears Dockers and hates pitchers who throw to first) over the issue that it might as well have been an Opus Dei convention… (more)
EDITOR: Also see “Steroids loom large over [college football] programs”
One hypothesis is that the reason why authorities on all levels looked the other way when it came to Jerry Sandusky’s pedophilia was his involvement in providing steroids to Penn State football players and fear that the arrest of Sandusky would discredit the team and Penn State. Why did the the NCAA strip the football team for victories in past years unless there was evidence of impropriety that gave them an unfair advantage?
