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We haven't heard a lot lately about the NFL's world-class drug-testing program. No politicians holding the football model up as the gold standard, no football people smugly enjoying baseball's wrestling matches with the drug culture.
No, all's quiet on the bragging front now, what with Nick Kaczur wearing a wire for the feds because he was caught with a stash of Oxycodone, and David Jacobs laying dead.
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| Goodell was hearing the praise over other sports heads, but look again. (Getty Images) |
The math is really pretty simple, as you know. We're talking about detectable against undetectable drugs. We're talking about thoroughness and efficacy of testing. We're talking about talking it against walking it, and between the chemists and the players who want the extra edge or the extra year or the extra contract, we're talking leagues that really can't win, or for that matter even break even.
But the Kaczur and Jacobs stories show us just how far the NFL is from the glowing reports of competence and compliance we heard when it was baseball's turn to be shamed by its corporate myopia.
As far as anyone knows, the stories are unrelated -- and we say as far as anyone knows because nobody knows a whole lot, or at least nobody knows a lot that they are willing to share at this point. And by any measure, the Jacobs story is far creepier, for he was a major supplier of steroids and other felonious chewables, having been sentenced to three years' probation and having just handed the NFL a list of clients. And his death -- ruled a suicide by the Dallas County medical examiner -- only ups the ante.
And we have no conspiracy theories to share with you on either story, because too much is still not known and too much would have to be assumed and/or inferred to get from Point A to Point Q. But here's what we do have -- more indications that the NFL is struggling with the issue just as much as we thought it should when it was being held up as the industry exemplars in the field of drug policing. The assumptions that the NFL's problem had to be fairly severe because of the physical and economic demands of the industry are holding true, if only because the logic screamed that it must be so.
And here's the new answer for those politicians (including, as we recall, John McCain) who raved about the NFL's skill with the problem when they were lining up to take swipes at baseball for its lack of same:
Sorry, we know far too little about this to make an intelligent sound bite ... if such a thing as an intelligent sound bite exists.
The NFL has a problem, as great as, if not actually greater than baseball's, though smaller than the culture's at large. We cannot know how hard the NFL is attacking the problem because we only have the league's word on that, and like baseball it has as many reasons to be circumspect as it does for being forthcoming. Sincerity is not a statistically measurable thing to judge.
All we know now is this: Nobody's getting it very right, at least not right enough to say, "We have the drug thing handled." Oh, people will say it in defense of their own industries, but the Kaczur and Jacobs stories tell us that the best way to have one's shortcomings exposed is to say that none exist. There is no model plan save relentless, tireless pursuit and punishment forever and ever, with public admissions that some folks are beating the system every day.
That's the best you can hope for in any business which pays for longevity in a business that mitigates against it. Baseball found out the size of its problem. Football is learning that now. And all we can say to the other leagues is this:
You have a problem, too, and if you want it publicly exposed, the first thing you should do is talk about how great your program is. Pride goeth before a fall, as the man once said, and these days the fall is far worse than the admission that your best isn't always going to be good enough.
Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.