And Speaking of Shrinking Balls...

Super-sizing Football Players in College

There's a Good Chance It's Not All Mom's Home Cookin' 

I think we, as football fans, universally enjoy an unexpected ball-handling play by the behemoths that toil on the line, even more so when it is the biggest player in the league.  William "The Refrigerator" Perry of the Chicago Bears, one of only two players at the time in the NFL (1980's) who weighed in above the 300 lb mark, was such a player, famously called upon to run the ball when they were inside the two yard line.  

Here we have Baylor Fullback LaQuan McGowan, tipping the scales near 400 lbs, receiving a TD pass in the 2015 Cotton Bowl against Michigan State:

 

So, yeah, the one huge guy on the team gets his moment of glory.  The problem is, 300 lb giant linemen have become more the norm than the exception, and this isn't even the NFL: 

BAYLOR BEARS Football Team

(Partial roster)

75           Andrew Billings                 DT           6-2          300         SO          Waco, TX

76           Jason Osei                        OL           6-4          300         SO          --

93           Suleiman Masumbuko      DT           6-2          300         JR            Euless, TX

95           Beau Blackshear               DL           6-4          300         JR            Waco, TX

55           Kyle Fuller                         OL           6-5          305         SO          Wylie, TX

71           Devonte Jones                  OL           6-2          305         FR           Houston, TX

75           Troy Baker                         OT           6-7          305         SR           Waco, TX

58           Spencer Drango                OT           6-6          310         JR            Cedar Park, TX

69           Pat Colbert                         OL           6-6          310         JR            Kilgore, TX

73           Blake Muir                          OL           6-6          310         JR            --

70           Josh Pelzel                         OL           6-6          320         FR           Rockdale, TX

61           Jarell Broxton                    OL           6-5          330         JR            Gaithersburg, MD

67           Desmine Hilliard               G             6-5          340         JR            Dallas, TX

72           Blake Blackmar                 OL           6-5          340         FR           Houston, TX

60         LaQuan McGowan         G             6-7          390         JR            Amarillo, TX

 

Mind you, the little guy in the foreground is likely a former football player

A Brief History of Bulk
It took the human species hundreds of thousands of years to change or evolve just minor aspects of our body characteristics.  Access to enough good food was probably the difference between middle age knights and the smaller peasant population.  In 1970 there was only one NFL player above 300 lbs.  By 1990, 94 of these big men were in the league, 301 in 2000, 394 in 2009.  Those were the ones that made it - 532 of these giants hit the 2010 training camps.  They are athletes too, rather than the statistical tail end of the obesity curve.

How is this nation producing such a bumper crop of 300 pounders, not just in the NFL, but in college and high school?  Since we're not evolving real fast, and proper food has been available for awhile, I submit that the driver has been the use of steroids and HGH.  Furthermore, the primary cause of the rampant use of these drugs is a failure to effectively monitor and test for steroid and HGH use in college and in high schools, and it will lead to generations of health problems for student athletes nationwide.

Repercussions

The weight alone is unhealthy.  Sixty-nine of 70 collegiate offensive linemen had at least one condition that predicted they would be susceptible to heart disease later in life - this was in their "prime" college age years.  ESPN reported in 2006 that:  “The heaviest athletes are more than twice as likely to die before their 50th birthday than their teammates, according to a Scripps Howard News Service study of 3,850 professional-football players who have died in the last century.”  This isn't even based on the heaviest athlete profiles we're talking about now.  It's likely this lethality statistic is going to get worse.

  
Then there is the potential medical maladies that steroid use and abuse may cause over the long term.  Because of its later development, its use has generally remained in the dark, so long term studies are rare.  Still, known common near term effects, according to the NIH, include:  reduced sperm count and shrinking of the testicles, with male-pattern baldness and development of breasts that can be irreversible.  Women get more man-like, and that can't be good.  Case studies indicate blood vessel and heart issues, and liver cancer pose longer term risks.  Studies in mice predict a shorter life span in general.  HGH carries its own list of consequences, the highlights of which include an increased likelihood of diabetes and a menu of cancer types.

In terms of steroid and HGH abuse, to mangle a saying, the heavy football players could just be the highly visible portion of the iceberg.  There are athletes of all shapes and sizes, male and female looking to get an edge, willing to take the risk to get recruited by a college or make the pros.  And that risk is really the long term, poorly defined health risk, not the risk of getting caught, because that's relatively non-existent and/or lightly punished.

Role Models
What's allowed to exist at the top levels influences every potential participant below them.  It becomes not just a way to gain an advantage, but a virtual requirement.  A system failing to effectively deter use does a grave disservice to both the reticent athletes who take the high road and now are effectively side-lined, and those that are swayed to partake just to remain competitive.  Consider the use of EPO in professional cycling, for example.  It was only these PED users who could compete for wins in the years that followed Greg Lemond.  And we only know this because rigorous testing is done now, and it took decades to evolve it to this point.  Such testing is weak at best in the NFL, possibly because those bigger-better-faster characteristics are exactly what the audience wants and the administration under Commissioner Goodell strives to deliver.  However, the NFL, like other professional sports, is not an island unto itself - according to a story in USA Today following the big AP analysis of PED use:

“Behavior by the pros trickles down to the college players, and to younger boys seeking to emulate their idols. Boys with NFL ambitions couldn't miss the fact that NFL and big-time college linemen are giants. It's hard to avoid suspicions that steroids or harder-to-detect HGH helped them get that way."

Enforcement is Weak
Test regimens, as they are executed now, are ineffective and inconsistent across any league/state/conference you look at.  Ofttimes on purpose.  As stated by Don Caitlin, an anti-doping pioneer and UCLA lab tester:

 “Even when players are tested by the NCAA, people involved in the process say it's easy enough to anticipate the test and develop a doping routine that results in a clean test by the time it occurs. NCAA rules say players can be notified up to two days in advance of a test, which Catlin says is plenty of time to beat a test if players have designed the right doping regimen. By comparison, Olympic athletes are given no notice.

'Everybody knows when testing is coming. They all know. And they know how to beat the test,' Catlin said, adding, 'Only the really dumb ones are getting caught.'

Players are far more likely to be tested for drugs by their schools than by the NCAA. But while many schools have policies that give them the right to test for steroids, they often opt not to.”

And it's happening despite the published NCAA test failure rate of well less than 1% at the time Barry Oldenburg played for Colorado State (and later in the NFL).

"Oldenburg told the AP he was surprised at the scope of steroid use in college football, even in Colorado State's locker room. 'College performance enhancers were more prevalent than I thought,' he said. 'There were a lot of guys even on my team that were using.' He declined to identify any of them.'"

So What?
Most of this information on steroids and HGH is old news.  The leaders of the NFL and MLB, and even their players unions, have effectively brushed this information aside with the tacit approval of the fans.  (If more attention than lip service were being paid, Bob Costas would have been MLB Commissioner by now.)  Why bring up another downer when we already have the spectre of concussions beating us about the head after merely 20 years of "study"?

Here's the rub, per Wired.com:

“In a recent survey of 3,705 kids, 11 percent of teens in grades 9 through 12 reported having used synthetic human growth hormone without a prescription. That means that at any high school football game, it’s likely that at least two players on the field will have tried human growth hormone.”

There are over 16 million kids in high school as of fall 2014.  That means as many as 1.8 MILLION KIDS could be dabbling in or regularly using drugs to boost their physical characteristics, with typical teen attention level to the consequences.  If we take another two decades to forcefully act on this, 36 MILLION STUDENTS will have got on the PED bandwagon, some of them lifelong users like former NFL defensive end Lyle Alzado (fortunately it's a short life, so the drugs won't cost them quite as much...).

Why do they do this?  Because they can, and it looks to be amply rewarded by colleges and professional sports with little downside.  Football is just one example area.

Baylor coach Art Briles calls LaQuan McGowan 2034.

That’s the year Briles thinks 6-foot-7, 400-pound offensive linemen like McGowan will be the norm instead of the exception.

America needs someone with the fortitude, the integrity, the non-steroid-shrunken balls to step up and address this issue in the NFL and the NCAA, and we have to start now.  It's not just the adult NFL players who will pay down the road for their choices, it's everybody who wanted to be a player all the way down the line.

‘Roids or Gamma Rays – You Decide