An Aside on...Football. NFL Football.

An Aside on...Football. NFL Football.
by Dileep Rao

So, the NFL draft is upon us in short order. Let me say a few things about the league before I get down to brass tacks on the Broncos, my team, next time.

The league is on the cusp of entering that abyss known as a steroid scandal. It has a tougher screening system than that Swiss cheese of a joke system that Major League Baseball uses, but it is deeply and easily beatable. And that's not because the league is totally taking its eye off the ball. The science of steroid use and its detection has become a very shadowy, sometimes subjective arms race with players taking weirder and more custom designed substances in efforts to duck the laggard testing systems which are always behind. Since the detection system has to first learn, in the broader world, about these substances before they can test for them, they are always going to lag the users.

What's to be done? Well, I can tell you what it smells like to me. The NFL will wait watch and see what happens to the moron guinea pig, that coddled, prodigal son of a sport, baseball. Baseball is the most poorly run sport of the major three in the US and is run, basically, by idiots. The NFL, on the other hand, is run by lawyers and businessmen. They will see how the Major Leagues change their system, and whether the public loses any of their interest in the sport. My prediction: people will be less attached to players and teams, something will go out of the game—maybe the sense of its connection to the past, perhaps its 'old timey' feel. But, largely, as the public has done with anything that requires moral courage, the public will shrug. They will say how bad they think it is, but the bottom line won't flutter much.

Then the NFL will probably make some minor and useless gesture toward further enforcement (testing more often or more players in the same permissive fashion) and join the state of sports: the nod and wink that says 'We can't stop you, not really. If you're smart, you'll use and get away with it.'

It is really about money. Baseball and football are gigantic megacorporations whose ship is just too large and too far marketed into the American subconscious for us to tune out. And so we will accept steroids, and in the future, maybe 15 to 20 years, genetic engineering.

What would work? Two very different paths, each with its negatives. First, two year bans and loss of pay for anyone that tests positive for a substance. Yes, players would have appeals, yes it could be retested, but if it comes out positive after that, the player is banned for two years and loses their pay. Also, they would have some cap on how much they could sing for, say half their current pay, when they do return. That would probably scare the players enough not to do it. The downside of this, because most football players are remarkably stupid, is that a few, maybe many, players will do it anyway, get caught and we'll agonize while a Jamal Lewis sits out two years (he should already be in jail), or a Peyton Manning, or some other superstar. Neither of these players, by the way, has been anything but squeaky clean with regard to steroids. I just use them as examples of what we might lose.

The second path: total permissiveness. Go for it. Open season. Do whatever you want. Which is, in some ways, exactly what the system is, if you use designer and cutting edge substances. The loss here is that we have now made a subspecies of human being. The game is no longer played by humans using their natural potential but those that are willing to mortgage themselves further and further into the future for gains now. Something moral is lost by a society that sanctions this kind of self destruction for our entertainment.

There, I got that out of the way.

Next time I take up football, I'll talk Broncos.

Dileep can be reached at dileep@babblog.com.