Some penalty: Pro Bowl ban not enough for steroid users

February 6, 2007

Buried somewhere beneath halftime show pyrotechnics, inches of Miami rain and hours of Super Bowl analysis was the most entertaining portion of the NFL’s big day: the latest tweak to its steroid policy.

It seems feather-fisted commissioner Roger Goodell and his equally benign partner, union chief Gene Upshaw, think banning players who violate the league’s substance abuse policy from the Pro Bowl is the next big step to restoring the integrity of the game.

That decision would be considered merely misguided if not for the justification that it would hurt players who receive incentives for playing in the Pro Bowl. That little caveat makes it as unintentionally comedic as the phrase “Rex Grossman: Super Bowl quarterback.”

If Upshaw and the commish believe this sends a strong message about the league’s drug policy, they’re right: It lets fans and players alike know that the drug policy is a joke and that tacit approval of steroid use in the NFL is here to stay.

The move is a response to the potential public relations quandary of having San Diego Chargers’ steroid suspendee Shawne Merriman playing in the league’s all-star game on Saturday.

The Pro Bowl’s relegation to the end of the NFL season, unlike the midseason All-Star contests in other leagues, makes it a marginal event at best.

“Nobody wants to play in a Pro Bowl,” Hall of Famer Troy Aikman told USA Today in 2005. “Everybody wants to be voted in. Everybody wants to be in Hawaii. But nobody wants to play.”

These factors, combined with the fact that many players opt out due to injury in any given year, make the game as anticipated as a colonoscopy and just as uncomfortable to watch. While the incentives involved are several times the average working stiff’s yearly take, they’re mere padding for star players who get vertigo from staring down at the league minimum salary.

To translate, the league just told 300-pound high school linemen, college wide receivers going through their second ACL reconstruction and pros who make the guys from “North Dallas Forty” look like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir that the only consequence of steroid use in the NFL, other than a paltry four-game suspension, is exclusion from a game nobody cares about. Meanwhile, Goodell will keep handing out wrist-slap suspensions and Upshaw will keep hearing it from retirees who can’t use certain appendages anymore.

Perhaps someday someone will tear his or herself away from a beer commercial long enough to care.