FanHouse Nfl Drug Testing

Not to pick on poor Calvin Pace, who claims today to be the latest NFL victim of those sneaky, nefarious over-the-counter supplements, but come on here, people. At what point is it fair to start calling out the NFL on the performance-enhancing drug issue? This guy's no superstar, but he's an important player on a New York team. The baseball equivalent would be somebody like Ryan Church on the Mets or Hideki Matsui on the Yankees. Imagine if one of those guys had been suspended today for steroids? Would ESPN even think about leading SportsCenter with anything else?

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This isn't about your stance on the legality of marijuana, or how many football players or college students smoke the stuff on a regular basis. Those arguments only cloud the issue. This is about people doing stupid things and getting punished for it. In the cases of Percy Harvin and Brandon Tate, the two receivers who reportedly tested positive for marijuana at the NFL scouting combine, the issue couldn't be more simple.

These two guys will not be drafted as high as their abilities and resumes say they should. In the case of Harvin, he's gone from a first-half-of-the-first-round pick to a guy who might slip all the way into the second round and beyond. Tate could have been a second- or third-round pick but is now likely to slip further.

And that is 100 percent fair. For a couple of reasons.

Jason Cole has been a respected NFL writer for well over a decade, so his Yahoo! Sports report that says the NFL has told Brian Cushing and Clay Matthews Jr. they didn't test positive for steroids at the scouting combine certainly trumps the one-sentence report by NFLDraftBible.com that says they did.

Cole cites "sources close to both players" who say the USC linebackers (both potential first-round picks) went right to Dr. John Lombardo, who administers the NFL's drug-testing policy, and were told they did not test positive for banned substances and had "nothing to worry about."