For me there's a clear difference between PEDs in baseball and in football.
In baseball something as simple as hitting he ball 10 feet further can make the difference between an average career or a hall of fame career. Taking PEDs to gain that 10 feet bothers me.
Football however is truly a team sport - if someone comes back sooner from injury that doesn't bother me. Nor does the prospect of a player using steroids etc. it's the execution, teamwork and strategy that make the difference in football.
I guess i just don't see PEDs as altering the outcome of games and careers quite the same way in football as in baseball.
I get what you're saying but that's actually why it's worse in Football. Baseball has always been stats focused and individual talent driven. That is why for the purist steroids represent being butt hurt. Still the argument I would make is baseline skill in baseball only tends to seperate the very good from the great, many of whom would have still been great absent steroids. Steroids simply offered them an opportunity to obliterate stats and reap rewards they might otherwise have not. Not so much in football (aside from QB's and fantasy where individual stats are becoming more of a focus) where size, speed, strength, endurance, durability can mask lack of sheer talent. In baseball those matter less than the ability to say locate the ball or contact it or field it. In football if you're enough of a measurables specimen teams and even media and fans will invest in you. And if you're coachable teams will scheme to optimize whatever underlying talent you might have.
I think since the late 80's PEDs have altered not only the outcome of games but it's landscape and lots of players and eventually the league are now facing paying the price for that altered landscape. PED's ruined wrestling as a sport and turned it into a sideshow. A decade ago football fans hung their hat on testing and mocked baseball and it's fans for not being ahead of the curve. Then they found out football isn't ahead of it either. Sadly football fans have over the course of the same time frame increasingly become action addicted entertainment fans with the encouragement of players, teams, owners and the sports media.
The latest talk is about football eventually becoming a waiver sport with a more limited pool from which to draw consisting mainly of guys willing to assume the risk and pay the price for a shot at the kind of money they can't approach elsewhere.
Fans IMO bear a great deal of responsibility in all of this because they could not muster or maintain the ire that would have put a stop to it. Their own addiction resulted in increasing rationalization that it was no big deal and nothing they should care about because they signed up to be increasingly entertained by an on field product and why should they care by what means individuals chose to fulfill their desires. Kind of like not wanting to know where your food supply comes from lest that limit your enjoyment while consuming it
We've also become a society that waxes poetic about personal responsibility while railing at the concept of personal consequence. Not to mention a litigious one that jumps at the chance to blame others for misleading us when a decision we make goes wrong.
If it means my team wins why should I care if the guys wearing it's uniform are thugs or cheaters on or off the field. Winning is all that matters because it makes me feel like a smart, even superior consumer by association. Sometimes we can see that minset in others and rail against it. The Penn State reaction would be an example. But it's easier to simply dismiss it lest we too appear to be homers or hypocrits. Because at the end of the day it's all about us and how we want to be perceived.
