LiveBall Sports

Performance enhancers: bad.  Painkillers: good, in the sense that consistent athletic performance is reliant on their availability.  Common sense, or meaningless distinction?

Well, it’s hardly common sense.  There is a distinction, and it’s not meaningless.  The distinction lies within the pattern of use: a “performance enhancer” is generally uses as a substance taken during training to gain an advantage over others using the same training techniques.  Anabolic steroids and blood doping fall under this designation.  Of course, that doesn’t make either of those things exclusive to the media-perpetrated definition of performance enhancers.  Steroids can also be used in perfectly reasonable, and harmless ways.  An athlete who has surgery to repair a body part after injury might be prescribed a steroid to help assist the recovery.  This is “using”, in the clearest sense of the term, but it’s also not really illegal, nor does it ago against well-established norms in athletics.

The problem that our congress and professional sporting governing bodies have created is that we now have a system where we have a clear line drawn between what is legal use of performance enhancers, and what is considered illegal use: it’s about not testing positive.

That’s where we’re at.  Steroid use is okay in your sport, even encouraged, as long as you are not risking a positive test that could cost your organization, or your sponsors, money.  In essence, we’ve granted cheaters the opportunity to be clean, as long as they conform to standards, and we’ve risked players who aren’t trying to manipulate the system for their advantage testing positive and then having to stand up, take their public shaming, and move on.  That’s the culture that our response to the outbreak of anabolic steroid use has created.

Sure, there are clear, testable short-term health effects of continued use of PED’s.  There are also unquantifiable performance advantages to continued use.  And major professional sports have a responsibility to make sure that anabolic steroid use not become so rampant that using becomes a prerequisite to making it big enough to get a sufficient salary for the work you do.  At the same time, the current attitude to try to outlaw, stop, and de-rail usage is in itself, harmful.

My solution to the anabolic steroid conundrum lies in the middle.  College sports programs already attempt to regulate the amount off hours a coach can spend in a week with his team, preparing them for an upcoming game.  Do teams break these rules?  Of course.  The goal is to not prevent the use of methods and techniques that can help win the next contest: you don’t play to lose the game.  The goal of anti-steroid laws in baseball, basketball, football, soccer, track, and hockey should work to curb use by setting a defined limit.  Should anabolic creams be illegal if they cause a positive test?  I don’t see why they would be.  That’s part of the competition, treating the athletes so that they can recover more quickly than they would otherwise be able to and get back to competing.  What should be disallowed is the illegal training regimen that became so popular in baseball in the late nineties.

Prosecute violations at their heart: suspend the player, the trainer, the coach, and sanction the organization, and people will get the point quickly.  But don’t worry about the dreaded “positive test”.  The use of anabolic steroids to gain an advantage in sports has never been illegal, nor should it be.

What needs to go punished is when athletes make the sport dangerous.  Bigger, stronger, and faster can quickly become too big, too strong, and too fast.  Those athletes with a ton of natural talent (testosterone) don’t need to use anabolic steroids to gain an advantage, as they are the standard.  Take NFL linebacker Shawne Merriman for example.  Merriman tested positive for steroids and missed four games.  Is he a cheater?  Well, in baseball, he would be considered one.  In the NFL, he was reprimanded for his use in violation with a first-time offenders policy.  You see, Merriman has since suffered a major knee injury, and has not been the same football player since.  He was a user.  He was caught.  He is not a cheater.  Had he continued to push himself past the point where he could contribute to his team, he would have taken himself out of the league.

This happened to former Cardinals receiver David Boston as well.  As his BMI shifted to well out-of-proportion levels, Boston lost his functional athleticism.  He became a freak.  But the league didn’t have any use for him.  You see, the NFL has it right.  They’ve come under criticism for their looseness on anabolic steroids, but they do it the right way.  If getting bigger and bulkier becomes more important than becoming better at your craft, the team will replace you.  In the NFL, they have a substance abuse policy, and if you don’t abuse it, you can take any supplement you want.  As soon as your desire to lift becomes greater than your desire to play, you get replaced.

Other sports have struggled to solve this conundrum.  Baseball seems to just feed the perception of wrongdoing by paying mega-bucks for performance of the top ten percent of baseball players.  Of course, we’re dealing with supremely talented players, and they would still be the best of the best even if they weren’t using.  What performance enhancers appear to have done in baseball is to prolong the careers of superstars, who battle their age though illegal methods.  How awful is this?  I don’t think it’s a travesty.  The bigger issue is that because these are the examples the players are setting for college and high-school type talent, you get a lot of widespread use at the lower levels of professional baseball, and a lot of the players don’t make it up the ladder even with the assistance of performance enhancing drugs.

There will always be stories written about the 33rd round pick who signs to play rookie ball, and keeps getting passed over because other lower round picks grow their bodies to be bigger, faster, and stronger via illegal means.  It’s those players who need to be protected by steroid laws.  It’s the undrafted free agents in football, and the bench players in the NBA that need to be protected against other marginal players who keep their jobs through use of PED’s that goes beyond the realm of reason.  The idea is not to strive for a purist sport, but to hold teams accountable for doing their own drug testing on players who are trying to get their foot in the door.  All the focus on the players like Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, and Shawne Merriman does is distract from the fact that these guys were going to make it anyway, but simply should have been more responsible about how they cut corners in their workout regimen.

That’s my issue with the whole thing.  The approach by the active decision-making bodies is wrongheaded, so it shouldn’t surprise that the results are ineffective.  A more realistic approach is a prerequisite for achieving positive use in curtailing anabolic steroid abuse.

Use: okay.  Abuse: no place in our games.

It sure felt like the Jaguars were playing the spoiler role against the Texans’ playoff hopes at home this Sunday.  On the season, the Texans have accomplished more impressive feats than the Jags, and after the Titans won five games in a row to get back into the AFC Wild Card race, the Jaguars were an afterthought at best.

Seriously.

Aside from cheap attendance jokes and puns, the Jaguars win over the Texans puts the team at 7-5 on the season, and right in the thick of the AFC Playoff race.

If the Jags are going to get to January, they will have to go through both Indianapolis and New England to get there.  But the most important game is next week’s intrastate showdown with the 6-6 Dolphins.

How much credit should we give the Jaguars?  Well, for starters, this is more or less the same team it’s been the last two seasons.  It’s a highly efficient offense that lacks explosive-play ability, despite having Maurice Jones-Drew in the backfield.  It’s a well-concieved offense that stays inside it’s limits and gives Jones Drew his touches.  The linebackers are active and can support the run as well as any in the league, but the Jags have no ability whatsoever to get after a passer and the coverage units have been largely a disappointment outside of 3rd round rookie Torrie Cox (William & Mary).  Josh Scobee is not having a good year on field goals.

This is who the Jags are.  Last year, they went 5-11 with this team.  This year, they’ve already won more games than that, as they will finish no worse than 7-9, and 8-8 should be easily obtainable.  To get to the playoffs though, the Jags need to get to 10 wins, or at the very least, 9 wins with help.  Of course, that help is going to have to come from themselves.  The Miami Dolphins play a whole bunch of winnable games down the stretch.  The Jaguars lose the tiebreaker to them if they lose to them head-to-head this week.  A simple win at home would put away the Dolphins as a wild card contender, move the Jaguars to 8-5, and put them alone in the drivers seat for the playoff.  And a loss…well, that makes the Jags just the same old team.  Just not good enough.

Is there fire here?  Ask me again next week, when the fate of the Jags is clear.

The only real drama for the BCS selection show this year was 1) whether or not there would be an excuse for screwing Boise State out of an invite, and 2) who would get the 4th and final at-large bid.  I’m going to tell you who is going to got it, but I’m also going to tell you why I think they shouldn’t have.  (And Boise State didn’t possibly get left out…did they?)

There are 9 teams who either have less than two losses, or have two losses but have earned an automatic bid.  They are: Alabama (SEC), Texas (Big 12), Cincinnati (Big East), Oregon (Pac 10), Ohio State (Big Ten), Georgia Tech (ACC), Florida (At-Large), TCU (At-Large), and Boise State (At-Large).  All bid except Boise’s are earned and guaranteed.  Boise’s (13-0, win over Oregon) is sufficiently earned.

The final spot was really wide open, heading into the selection process.  The leader, and most obvious pick, would have been two-loss Iowa, who has a much stronger case than two loss Penn State.  And at the selection meeting, the BCS committee did the expected, naming Iowa as the opponent of the Georgia Tech Yellowjackets in the Orange Bowl.

Iowa lost two of their final three games to end the season and is very lucky to still be in the Top 10 in the BCS Standings.  They’re still around only because they play against the fictitiously strong Big Ten competition.  And it’s because of that competition that I think they were a poor choice for the Orange Bowl Berth.  Here are some 3-loss teams that got jobbed, and the cases I would have made in favor of them.

LSU* — They were more deserving, in my opinion, than Iowa, but unfortunately the rules of the BCS bowls prohibit their inclusion because they would have been the 3rd team in from the SEC.  So they’re out.

Virginia Tech – Probably would have been my first choice.  They went 9-3.  They did so in a conference that splits it’s championship game participants into two divisions.  Va. Tech’s conference record was identical to division champion Georgia Tech, the only difference is one played Alabama (Va. Tech) and the other played Jacksonville State (Ga. Tech).  Well, that, and Ga. Tech won the head to head match-up that decided the ACC.  Still, I would rather have seen them rematch rather than give defensive-minded Clemson a shot at a BCS Bowl.  Just because Va. Tech didn’t play in the championship doesn’t make them less deserving than GT.

Miami (Fla.)  — The ACC narrowly avoided chaos in the wake of Georgia Tech’s loss to Georgia.  Miami did not tie for the ACC Atlantic division title, but only because they failed to take care of Clemson in overtime.  Had Miami won that game, they, and not Georgia Tech, would have played Clemson for the ACC title.  But Georgia Tech would still have only been a two loss team.  They would have likely gotten the final at large BCS bid.  Which, in my mind, validates Miami’s case at the BCS bid, at least over Iowa.  Sure, they did lose that overtime game, but they swept their out of conference schedule, which was far more impressive than Iowa’s or Penn State.

West Virginia — Here’s a team, 9-3, in the vastly superior Big East (compared to the Big Ten, at least), it misses the BCS because of a bad loss to USF.  They went undefeated at home against a difficult schedule, losing only at Auburn, at USF, and at Cincinnati.  They did have their chances, but here’s a team that beat Pittsburgh when they were a top ten team, beat a strong Rutgers team on the road, compiled a computer average of exactly .4600.  That’s not higher than Iowa, but it is higher than Penn State in that same conference.

Pittsburgh — Another 9-3 team, but they started 9-1, and looked dominant taking care of Notre Dame.  Pittsburgh beat everyone on their schedule who they were stronger than, after a horrendous loss to North Carolina State.  That pretty much made them not BCS worthy, but even their resume might have been more impressive than Iowa.  Not saying anything definitive there.  A .2500 computer average is pretty unbecoming of a BCS team.

So there you have it.  The ACC and Big East were both more deserving of  a team receiving an at large bid than the Big Ten.  In fact, even champion Ohio State looks mediocre in comparison to the above (save Pittsburgh).  Iowa had their chance to sleepwalk through an easy schedule, win a bunch of games, and then beat Ohio State at the Horseshoe to secure that automatic bid, losing a thriller because HC Kirk Ferentz was hesitant to go for the win when he had a chance as an underdog.  Ohio State lost to 4-loss USC at home, nearly got upset by Navy, and really only belongs in the BCS because they proved to be the most deserving team from the Big Ten.  And to add another team seems to defy logic, and establish a barrier between a two and three loss team that is being viewed as the same difference between a perfect season and a one loss season.  It may have been the easiest decision by the pollsters, but it wasn’t the right one.

But then again, at least the deserving mid-majors made it.  Officially, thanks to a 13-0 season from Boise State, 2009 is the first year ever where two mid-majors will be part of the BCS bowls.  Consider this your official PSA courtesy of LiveBall for the month of December.  I like it when deserving parties don’t get screwed.