This week, instead of speaking about sports on the professional level, I’ll focus on collegiate student-athletes. There are many things related to “cheating” for college athletes. I don’t want to cover everything in one post, so for now I’ll speak about the direct cheating of college athletes. This, of course, deals with the usage of PEDs. Since the collegiate drug-testing system is not as accurate as the systems in professional sports, countless college athletes use needles to gain weight, muscle mass, etc. This is a looming issue in college football, in which someone can gain up to 30 pounds over the course of a few months, and not draw much attention from the NCAA or their school. While weight gain doesn’t necessarily correlate to steroid usage, rapid weight growth such as this provides cause for concern.
College football boasts a near-zero rate of positive steroids tests, which isn’t an accurate gauge among college athletes. Random drug testing allows many cheater to go unnoticed. One interesting story revolves around the Colorado State football team. Clint Oldenburg, who played for Colorado State starting in 2002 and for five years in the NFL, had a weight increase over four years from 212 to 290; this included a one-year gain of 53 pounds, which he attributed to diet and two hours of weight lifting daily. While he was never found or admitted to being guilty, he did say this: “College performance enhancers were more prevalent than I thought. There were a lot of guys even on my team that were using.” Now when a fellow athletes even address the issue, is it possible for the NCAA to mask a steroid epidemic in college football? What is bubbling under the surface in college football, which helps elite athletes gain unusual amounts of weight? Although the answer isn’t clear, there is reasonable justification that this is the result of performance-enhancing drugs.
I agree with that this a big reason for concern. I find it a bit interesting that the NCAA does not really have much of a policy in place for this. This leads me to further question the reputation of the NCAA and its executives. As more and more stories like this come to the surface, it leads me to believe that NCAA only cares about money and the product that they are able to deliver to increase their revenues. I think they really abuse their authority over college sports.
To start, these increases in weight, at least in my opinion, are directly correlated to PEDs. No question about. Saying that, I think that a lot of college athletes use these drugs because of peer pressure but not just from their teammates. A lot of these collegiate athletes want to make it to the professional level. Therefore, they believe that the only way to become better than the competition is to use PEDs. I don’t think that when they use these drugs they are considering the ethical side of their decision because at the present moment they only care about gaining an edge in order to go pro.