With rise of 300-pound players, how can House go so easy on the NFL?

May 6, 2005

The super-slick NFL has gotten away with another fast one.

After skewering Major League Baseball, the House Committee on Government Reform turned its performance-enhancing-drugs inquisition toward the NFL last week. It turned into a D.C. love-in.

The difference reminded why it is hard to take Congress seriously on the matter of steroids in sports.

For the baseball hearing, the committee subpoenaed big-name players such as Curt Schilling, Rafael Palmeiro and Sammy Sosa and retired stars Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire. Playing to the cameras, committee members grilled commissioner Bud Selig and his associates.

For the NFL, the committee all but rolled over and begged for tickets to Washington Redskins games.

Selig is right when he says, "We are held to a higher standard and a different standard."

It is easy to pick on Selig and baseball. The NFL is so scarily good at mind-control public relations that it has turned the release of the regular-season schedule into a big event. Congress had no desire to irritate NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue.

No current NFL players were asked to testify; a remarkable omission that said just how serious the committee was about this.

Tagliabue and yes-man union head Gene Upshaw had the congressmen eating out of their hands.

Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., said he had "nothing but admiration" for Tagliabue, and that was the hard-hitting stuff.

"I mean, I kind of love you guys," Shays said. "But I shouldn't. Because I still have problems [with the drug policy.]"

No kidding.

Do not readily accept, as Congress did, the Tagliabue spin that all is pure in the NFL.

Something strange is going on here. The circumstantial evidence is hard to overlook.

Current rosters for the 32 NFL teams list 435 players at 300 or more pounds. Green Bay tops the list with 20 players at 300-plus pounds. Only Indianapolis and the New York Jets are not in double figures for 300-pounders. The Cowboys are near the average with 14.

When the 28 NFL teams went to camp in 1990, there were only 65 players at 300 or more pounds.

So many players do not get that much bigger in a small time by gorging on double-meat cheeseburgers, as Tagliabue suggested. It is not natural.

Steve Courson understands that.

Courson was an offensive lineman for eight seasons with Pittsburgh and Tampa Bay. He is also an admitted steroid user who has had heart problems since retiring after the 1985 season.

Courson was the only player, present or past, who made it to the hearing. The staggering increase in big players cannot be overlooked, he said.

"I don't believe for a second that every player is a product of modern chemistry," Courson told the committee. "But the NFL is a business that values bigger, stronger, faster."

In that environment, players will find ways to beat the system.

According to 60 Minutes, three members of the Carolina Panthers obtained prescriptions for steroids from a South Carolina doctor shortly before playing in Super Bowl XXXVIII.

If that can happen before the most important game of the season, how many other holes are there in Taglibue's vaunted testing program?

The NFL does have tougher penalties than baseball for violating the drug policy, which is why Selig in his clumsy way asked the players union to again reopen talks on baseball's punishment scale. The NFL's list of prohibited substances includes ephedra, a ban on which was recently lifted by a federal court.

It keeps coming back to the same question. If the NFL is free of performance-enhancing drugs, why are 300-pounders so commonplace?

Taglibue invoked the innovative obesity approach.

Steroid users are lean and sculpted, Tagliabue told Congress. "Our players are exhibiting none of those characteristics," Tagliabue said. "They have high body fat. They tend to be the antithesis of the sculpted, lean athlete."

Nate Newton was ahead of his time.

Steroid users may have lean and sculpted bodies, but that does not hold for users of Human Growth Hormone. It makes big players massive.

Testosterone is a base chemical for steroids. A player must have about six times the normal level of testosterone before being in violation of the NFL policy.

No one has proven that substances such as steroids help baseball players. The opposite is true in the NFL, where a game can hinge on whether your 340-pounder can push around the other guy's 350-pounder. No matter what the NFL spin controllers say, where there is an incentive, there is a way.

Gerry Fraley is a sports columnist for The Dallas Morning News.