College Football Is Probably Juiced, But Does Anyone Really Care?

It was one those cute bloggy space-fillers we tend to skim and then forget about altogether, passed along from one site to the next with a series of jokes about peanut-butter sandwiches and the freshman 15: a University of Florida quarterback named Will Grier had bulked up from 172 pounds to 215 pounds in the course of the offseason. Only in retrospect did it become suspicious; only after Grier tested positive for some sort of banned substance this week, precipitating a one-year suspension, did we all look back and wonder what the hell had just happened.

Of all the odd stories breaking in college football in recent days, this might be the oddest: When was the last time a quarterback was suspended for taking performance-enhancing drugs? It had been so long since an athlete with the profile of Grier—one of the key offensive cogs on a team that had gone undefeated through the first half of the 2015 college football season—was suspended for PED use that it took most people entirely by surprise. Maybe we should have seen it coming, but that's the curious thing about PED use, particularly when it comes to college football: you never know exactly what you're seeing.

Back in 2012, the Associated Press did an extensive analysis of PED use in college football, speaking to players and testers and dealers and other experts, and studying the weight records of more than 61,000 players. What they found is not exactly a shock: far more players use PEDs than the NCAA's near-zero positive steroid testing rate bore out. There are ways to get around the tests, and players are generally notified days before; some colleges are "reluctant to spend money on expensive steroid testing when cheaper ones for drugs like marijuana allow them to say they're doing everything they can to keep drugs out of football," the AP wrote. Stories of dramatic summertime weight and strength gains are commonplace across the sport, and are almost never accompanied by the sort of skepticism that would greet similarly sudden physical transformations in, say, Major League Baseball, even though the AP reported that:

Regardless of school, conference and won-loss record, many players gained weight at exceptional rates compared with their fellow athletes and while accounting for their heights. The documented weight gains could not be explained by the amount of money schools spent on weight rooms, trainers and other football expenses.

Adding more than 20 or 25 pounds of lean muscle in a year is nearly impossible through diet and exercise alone, said Dan Benardot, director of the Laboratory for Elite Athlete Performance at Georgia State University.

And:

In the most extreme case in the AP analysis, the probability that a player put on so much weight compared with other players was so rare that the odds statistically were roughly the same as an NFL quarterback throwing 12 passing touchdowns or an NFL running back rushing for 600 yards in one game.

Of course, the AP spoke to some players who said they merely put on weight through a process of eating and bodily development, adding fat along with lean muscle. That's what makes this so complicated on the college level: sometimes an athlete who gains 40 pounds, as Grier did, really is just lifting weights and pigging out on peanut-butter sandwiches.

This is one reason why Grier's suspension was so shocking. Grier claims that he took a supplement containing a banned substance and didn't fully realize what he was doing, and it's almost plausible: if he wanted to, he probably could have gamed the system and gone full-on BALCO. Instead, he became an explicit reminder that PED use has and will continue to persist in nearly every sport, at every level. Maybe you think it's a serious problem, or maybe you've grown so weary of the arguments that you just don't care anymore.

It has been nearly 30 years since an Oklahoma linebacker named Brian Bosworth tested positive for steroids in the days before the 1987 Orange Bowl, thereby becoming one of the first high-profile offenders of the NCAA's newly imposed drug-testing policy. Bosworth originally said a doctor gave him a six-week course of Deca-Durabolin to heal an ailing shoulder, at a time when steroids were often prescribed and were fully legal ("It's sort of like a woman getting pregnant in March and then finding out in August that its illegal to have babies," he said in his autobiography written with Rick Reilly, a book he's since largely disowned); he insisted that the NCAA's drug-tester had shown up at his hospital bed while Bosworth was on intravenous fluids following a severe case of food poisoning. Some of this proved to be a fiction, as Bosworth later admitted that he'd begun experimenting with steroids given to him by a doctor in the spring of 1986; either way, Bosworth did not engender much sympathy.

In the early years of college football's reckoning with steroids, these were the faces we saw: flamboyant outlaws like Bosworth and Tony Mandarich, a hulking behemoth of a Michigan State offensive lineman who posed for the cover of Sports Illustrated while insisting to writer Rick Telander that he'd never touched steroids, and then issuing a mea culpa to Telander for lying to him two decades later. At that point, the notion of PED use wasn't the morally divisive issue it is today; at that point, the public hadn't become fatigued by years of high-horse proclamations about baseball's PED scandals.

That's why Grier's case feels like a litmus test for college football. If he made an innocent mistake, as he insists he did, is a one-year suspension—25 percent of Grier's college career—really a fitting punishment for a first-time offender? For that matter, what do we really want out of drug testing on the college level, especially now that marijuana continues its slow crawl toward legality? Is it merely, as the AP noted in that 2012 investigation, a way for schools to say that they're doing something about a problem with varied layers of seriousness? The schools themselves are obligated legally to do something, since, as the AP noted, college athletes who compete at public schools are essentially "wards of the state." But what do we really want to do about it?

I imagine no one has any real idea how widespread PED use is in college football. I imagine even the strength coaches at major universities would rather keep their heads in the sand than ask too many questions about the rapid weight gains of the players they're training. I imagine coaches say the right things to their players, as Florida's Jim McElwain said he did; and I imagine many players try to do the right thing, as Grier did in the midst of copping to what he claims was an error in judgment. The whole issue has grown far more complex since the PED discussion began, 30 years ago. The question that lingers in the wake of Grier's suspension is: Do we even care to keep talking about it?