re: AP IMPACT: Steroids loom in major-college football

Yeah it's nothing new. When I was an undergraduate at Miami in the mid-1980s the strength coach was the steroid dealer. He got busted for distributing steroids in South Florida and the AD made a public statement that he didn't provide any players with juice, which was total bullshite. This was when Jimmy Johnson was the coach. The physical changes the guys would undergo from freshmen to seniors was amazing. Nobody's ever talked about that factor in Jimmy Johnson's success. I knew a couple of guys who went to the NFL that probably never would have had the chance without all the juice they did. One guy, who was the #1 pick, didn't do steroids and, while he wasn't a bust, didn't have the NFL career expected out of him.

One thing that used to happen back then, which probably still happens now, is that the school picks non-football athletes for random tests. So the track runners and swimmers get an inordinate amount of the testing.

I always suspected Nebraska had some kind of high quality steroid program under Tom Osborne too. They would get those farm boys bulked up. They'd show off their state of the art weight room and talk about all the hard work the team put in to get so physical but I think juice probably had a lot to do with it as well. Not that Nebraska was the only one, but they seemed kind of obvious.