Off-season thoughts: No one cares about Steroids/PEDs
by drinkycrow (2018-01-10 12:07:31)
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Imagine one percent of NCAA Div 1 football players are taking them. 128 teams, 85 scholarships = 10,880 players. If one percent were using PEDs, that would be about 108 players.

Imagine, for argument's sake, that a test could identify 5% of users. That would be about 5 or 6 players a year busted. I don't follow this closely, but that seems far higher than what is reported as happening.

This basic math seems to lead to 1 of 2 conclusions: either far less than 1% of college football players use steroids, or testing catches far less than 5% of PED users, to the point of functionally catching no one.

So each school is monitoring this on their own, with very little to no functional oversight from the NCAA. Any way to tell which schools might have less stringent enforcement? Not really, but the chart in the 538 article I linked from a few years ago demonstrates which schools over-performed with respect to their recruiting rankings. (For those interested, of course ND underperformed).

This could be due to excellent coaching, smart scheduling, dumb luck, etc. Maybe even if there were PED use it would not lead to out-performing expectations.

But, given what we know about human nature when it comes to cheating and incentivizing success, it is hard not to suspect that everyone is simply turning a blind eye to what may be a huge issue.





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