Late last week, the NFL reported that several players had violated the NFL's steroid policy, testing positive for a banned weight-loss diuretic. Several of the players testing positive are Minnesota Viking defensive tackles Pat and Kevin Williams, as well as New Orleans running back Deuce McAllister and defensive linemen Will Smith and Charles Grant.
Testing positive in the NFL is nothing new. There are always players looking for an edge, and those players are usually going to get caught. However, as the Winter Olympics show every four years, there are also the false positives because of the kind of cold medicine an athlete chooses.
Anyway, back to the NFL. Testing positive for illegal substances is not a shock, but the fact that the NFL has sub-par policies designed to help athletes is.
Viking wide receiver Bernard Berrian, when asked to comment on his two teammates, told of his experiences with the NFL hotline for drugs, in which players can call and learn if certain drugs or their ingredients are illegal or not.
According to ESPN, Berrian said in a Sirius radio interview that he has called the hotline twice, only to have no one answer on the other end. Only on his third try did he get a reply.
I've called twice before and actually never gotten a hold of anybody sometimes,"" Berrian said. ""So even when you try to do the right thing sometimes it is still hard to get a hold of somebody and really find out what you're really taking.""
The NFL has said that it will ""follow up"" on what Berrian has said. An internal investigation seems unlikely, as this situation is not really important.
However, this does raise an eyebrow to how some things are being run at headquarters.
Roger Goodell has quickly become the ""no-nonsense"" commissioner that has cracked down on everything, all the way down to off-the-field issues. It seems interesting for a league that is so caught up in making sure its players are following the book to drop the ball on its end, but that seems to be the case.
The NFL doesn't look good right now, as there seems to be just as much hypocrisy in the league's upper echelon as are the strong values that Goodell is looking to enforce.
People have already moved on and forgotten the infamous ""Spygate,"" which Goodell shamelessly swept under the carpet leading up to the Super Bowl.
Goodell has shown that he will play both sides of the line, doing whatever it takes to make the NFL look great, no matter what the cost. But as Berrian's comments have shown, the NFL and Goodell need to take a look in the mirror and clean up their own mess.
It is said that there is no such thing as bad publicity, and the NFL would love for that to be true in this case. Labeling Goodell as a hypocrite may be a little too harsh, but the fact that he seems to care more about the league's image raises some questions.
If you think the NFL needs to rewrite some of its policies, e-mail Nate at ncarey@wisc.edu.
