A look inside the beefed up huddle, By: Mike Freeman

09/08/06

This is a view from the inside, a dispatch from the seemingly once again steroid-infested front lines of professional football.

"If you are a player in this league you have to admit that in recent years the use of steroids and the use of (human growth hormone) have gotten worse," said a veteran NFL player. The player asked not to be identified, fearing retribution from his union as well as team and league officials.

"I have been a big backer of the steroid policy," said the player. "It worked. It scared people into not doing steroids. Most guys didn't touch them because they were afraid of the repercussions. Then I think the attitude of guys started to change. They started thinking the risk of suspension was worth the benefits of the drugs. I've heard stories of players using newer types of steroids and HGH. It's gotten crazy again. It's like the 1970s again."

We are beginning the celebration of a new NFL season. As a stone-cold football addict, I will watch every snap and pancake block.

Something, though, is different. My favorite sport is taking a credibility hit. This season is the season of drugs and needles and HGH and pimp-like doctors pushing their product. This season-opening celebration is more grim and dark than others in the last few years.

I will root, I will celebrate, and I will watch the New England Patriots shock the world and win the Super Bowl. Again. But this year will be different because steroids and football are, after a brief divorce, back together again.

And this is how it happened.

In the 1970s and 1980s, steroid use was rampant in football. There were more needles protruding from asses than there were chinstraps dangling from facemasks.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the NFL had a modicum of a policy, but stories and rumors persisted of sloppy lab work and manipulated test results.

By the mid-1990s, the policy was sound and fit though not perfect. Still, it sent chills down the spine of some footballers. "A lot of players were terrified of it," the player said.

The NFL's drug policy, for the past five to ten years, has served as the football equivalent of mutual assured destruction. The same way the United States and Soviet Union once pointed massive numbers of nuclear weapons at each other in order to prevent war, the NFL dangled a strong punishment and the aura of a rigid policy in front of its players, and scared many of them from dipping their musculature in the junk, players say.

Now, things have changed. As the drug technology has become more formidable, and the performance enhancers have become increasingly cloaked, hiding from testosterone hunters and their microscopes, players have become more emboldened.

Drug cheats are like cockroaches. You need to keep spraying and spraying. The NFL got cocky and then it got lazy thinking players had been scared straight. They weren't. They were just under the refrigerator quietly multiplying.

Washington Redskins offensive linemen Jon Jansen told HBO that 15 to 20 percent of the league is using some sort of performance enhancing drug and that number is on the rise. Former NFL Pro Bowler Dana Stubblefield said 30 percent of the league is using HGH.

"It's a whole new ballgame," my source said. "HGH changed things. But more importantly players aren't as afraid of the drug policy as they once were. They're testing it because they don't think they'll get caught whereas before they did think they would get caught. They wouldn't risk it."

Thus players have been jabbing the policy, probing it, trying to see what they can get away with because of the belief that the policy has lost its teeth.

That is what this recent rash of steroids stories is about. It is about players no longer being afraid of the big, bad, drug-testing wolf. And that is what the leaked story to the New York Times was about this week as well. The story with NFL officials pledging a stronger performance enhancing drug policy is just around the corner. It does not matter if the story is accurate or not; it is the NFL using the press to try and re-instill that fear deep inside the bones of their workforce.

When some Carolina Panthers players during their championship season were sucking up performance enhancing drugs like they were chocolate chip cookies, doing so just a short time before the Super Bowl, those acts more than anything spoke of that lack of fear of the policy.

Late Thursday evening another current veteran player initially defended the league's steroid testing policy, saying players that are critical of it are only attempting to "get their names in the media." Then the player, who asked to not be identified, admitted that because the money has become bigger than ever, so have the temptations. "We get tested all the time, I mean all the time," the player said. "I do understand there are doubts especially after what happened in Carolina ... No one knows the percentages, how much steroid use or HGH use is up. No one knows. It's all guesswork. Maybe the use is up. On the surface it makes sense." "I see the pressure to use steroids every day," the player continued. "You see guys getting bigger and stronger. You see guys get cut. You see guys lose their jobs and you want to make sure that doesn't happen to you. I'd be lying if I didn't say I was never tempted. You get tempted."

Said the player: "People are focusing too much on HGH or this or that. What needs to be done is level the playing field and you level the playing field by making guys think they will get caught. At this point I don't think most players that do these drugs think they will get caught."