Creeping Impact

The impact is starting to be seen at the lower levels of football.  Most NCAA Division I football players would love to play professionally.  They all want to win.  The pressures are adding up to more and more drug use in the college game.

On average, every team at a bowl game has one player who is going to test positive for PED’s.  Again, the tests can only catch a fraction of the—especially since the NCAA affords athletes 48 hours notice about tests.  The actual figure is likely much higher.

Jason Scucanek, who played for Brigham Young University (BYU), stated that on his team, he had proof that over a dozen players were using steroids, and that the number might have been as high as twenty.  Keep in mind, this is BYU; the school is hardly the anything-goes, football-first institution that you might find in the Deep South.  If BYU has twenty players on steroids, what do you think is the case at Florida, Florida State, LSU, Alabama….

Even at the high school level, football players are abusing PED’s.  A 2003 survey of 15,000 players found that six percent admitted to PED use.  With over a million boys playing football each year, that’s 60,000 high schoolers taking steroids!

Once again, the health effects are hardly worth it.  Liver damage.  Enlargement of the heart.  Increased risk of heart disease and death.  Depression.  Suicide.  Testicular atrophy. 

And again we have to ask why our young men are choosing to shrivel their balls and shorten their lives?

To succeed at a child’s game.