Unwind, It's Just the Combine

This past week Manti Te’o went to the NFL combine and was lambasted by the media regarding questions about the girlfriend that was as real as the lockness monster.

The kid answered the questions well and called the hoax ‘embarrassing,’ yet other than that he went about his business trying to prove himself for the scouts and general managers of the league.

Even after all of the memes, jokes, columns taking shots at his character, and ‘Manti Te’o Girlfriend Kiss-cam’ gags, Te’o’s talent outshines this particular scandal.

So Te’o, and the other 31 guys expected to be drafted in the first round in April really don’t need the services the NFL combine provides.

                                                          

It would not be any form of national travesty if the cream of the draft stock crop just up and decided not to work out at the combine. For the guys who are already going to get millions of dollars on their first contract, the combine is about as meaningful as going on a college interview when you’ve already received the acceptance letter.

Granted general managers and scouts watching guys jump, sprint, catch, lift weights, and condition does serve a purpose. The combine serves as a plateau for the unknown guys who didn’t play in a BCS Bowl game. A guy from Wichita State who may get drafted in round seven needs the attention of NFL teams more than the number one wide receiver prospect in the class.

So give the guy who needs a chance his fare shake by telling the guys who are going in the top 32 to stay home.

It’s not as if general managers and scouts are only giving a crap about the best once they walk into Indianapolis for the workouts. It is their job to watch countless hours of game film and hone in on a top player’s strengths and weaknesses. If the GM determines that this talent is worth x number of millions it makes more sense to spend the resources on some unknowns in order to have a deeper draft.

Perhaps the most popular example of the need for a deep draft (that you will hear way too much about come draft day) is that quarterback from Michigan that was drafted in round six in the year 2000 by the New England Patriots: you know that Brady guy.

The Pats first pick in that draft was some guy named Adrian Klemm out of Hawaii and he was out of the league by the year 2005.

In sports when a college kid from a big name school is good the entire professional community already knows about it. But when the schools are smaller kids have the potential to fall through the cracks.

In reality the guys who are projected to be first round draft picks can afford to take the combine off and not face any major consequences. And general managers would be better off focusing their resources on the unknown guys in order to get more good players in the same draft class.

This idea may not be as crazy as the Te’o girlfriend story, though it certainly is crazy enough to work.

All Star Burnout?

In between fantastic dunks, Chris Paul making Chris Bosh’s legs look like old western saloon doors, and Blake Griffin making fans beg for him to be in the dunk contest again there was something missing from the game; you know other than defense.

 That’s it; the All Star game was missing that unique relevance that makes the game matter.

It is not just in the NBA where the score has the same amount of worth as the points from Whose Line is it Anyway? None of the All Star Games have any relevance to the season.

Sure baseball tried that whole ‘winner of the all star game gets home field advantage in the world series’ thing back in 2003 to make the game matter. By doing so, teams in baseball who win more games does not mean that they get the deserved benefit of having home field advantage in the most crucial series of the year.

Instead, some terrible pitch from the Kansas City Royals pitcher could ruin the Yankees shot at having home field in the World Series.

The NFL is completely considering getting rid of the Pro-Bowl all together because they know the players don’t try to play hard and most of them don’t care about going.

Yet even though the games don’t matter, the spectacle draws well.

According to an article by broadcastingcable.com, a total of eight million people turned on TNT to watch the biggest names in basketball play the most anticipated pickup game of the year.

The pickup game mentality of the All Star game makes all of the statistics funnier than anything Dane Cook has ever said. Entering the game Kevin Durant had the chance to win consecutive all star MVP awards. This feat had not been accomplished in thirty years.

You can file that stat away with shooting percentage in hockey, wins above replacement in baseball, and total quarterback rating in football under the category of ‘nobody gives a flying fudge’ statistics.

Seriously, USA Today.com wrote an article back in 2011 suggesting that Kobe Bryant could be the greatest all star gamer ever. Bryant owns the all star game record for starts and four all star game MVP awards. Naturally the debate raged on about his performance in all star games compared to the best of the pickup games.

Being the greatest all star game player in league history is like Rihanna a teen choice award for her acting in Battleship: compared to the rest of their career accomplishments this one wins the Oscar for most useless.

This is not saying that every all star weekend is completely without merit. The skills competitions in the NBA and NHL are quite entertaining to watch and the NBA slam dunk contest can provide all of the dramatic moments fans want to see.

Bettman, Goodell, Selig, Stern do your leagues a favor and scrap this all star crap. It is a flawed concept that no longer has a purpose to serve. There is good reason to believe that multi billion pro sports industries would survive purging the expenditures of one weekend flop-fest a year.

Daring to Answer the PED Question

A wise man seeks knowledge and can spend an entire life's worth of searching for answers, only to find a sea of questions still roaring before him. 

This is not the case with performance enhancing drugs. 

For everyone who read Bill Simmons' latest piece (which was a well done article in every facet of writing by the way, and it has already incited debate across the internet) there are plenty of answers to the PED question. While Simmons addresses plenty of examples of wrongdoing in sports, he only damns wrongdoing and chastises the media and fans for not asking 'why don't we care that these guys cheat, and why don't we hold them to a higher standard?'

A fully loaded question has a chamber full of answers. Performance enhancing profiling, a seemingly arbitrary selection process of who cheated and who didn't based off of whether or not fans and the media like athletes, is a problem and one answer to the question.

Lance Armstrong is a world class jerk who was raked across the coals by everybody with a blog, podcast, column, radio show, or television talk show because his miraculous comeback from cancer was tainted. While Armstrong most assuredly deserved all of the scrutiny he deserved, there are the following points to consider.

• Fans expect everyone in the Tour De France to bike across an average of 2,235 miles.
• The shortest day of riding a bike during the tour is roughly 94 miles. 
• The riders’ bike for 21 straight days, or three consecutive weeks depending on how you look at it.
• The Pyrenees Mountain Chain is 305 miles long and has been a staple in the Tour De France since its inception. And that's the "easy" mountain in the race. 
• The longest stage is about 140 miles.
• Riding up a mountain is far more difficult due to the change in elevation and the decrease in breathable air. 
• The cyclists ride their bikes through multiple countries at some point or another in the race. 

This race is ludicrous by the standards of a normal human being. Most people may not be able to do this race over the course of two months, let alone three weeks. There is no way that the Tour De France would be able to get enough athletes to compete in this race without the unwanted aid of performance enhancing drugs. 

But God forbid if anyone took performance enhancing drugs to even complete this daunting race. It is also unthinkable that football players who weigh as much as hogs and run as fast as gazelles can't do either of those things naturally. And anyone who can hit a baseball traveling 90 plus miles per hour over 430 feet more than 30 times a year in seven months has to be juicing.  

Yet everyone wants to know why we don't talk about it more. How come Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless haven't ripped each others' heads off over this issue on First Take yet? How come nobody has the stones to stand up and say 'I think these guys are all using PED's?' 

The easiest and perhaps most logical answer is that there is no course of action regarding PED's that will end well. 

You can't legalize performance enhancing drugs in professional sports because it could lead to a legalized drug race. 

Teams with the highest payrolls across MLB, the NBA, the NFL, and the NHL would start to pay doctors who prescribe drugs for boatloads of HGH, danazol, and toradol. If a team didn't have as many doctors to prescribe these drugs in their back pockets, they would in theory lose out to teams that accepted doping. 

The governing bodies of professional sports would look like hypocrites and be chastised publicly again and again ad nauseum. Picture Bud Selig legalizing the bane of his tenure as baseball's commissioner. He'd be strung up by his baseballs and lit into for failing to protect the integrity of the game until the day he died. 

Not to mention the players of every sport who used PED's would try to sue their respective league after they retired. The narrative for the athletes here is simple: I didn't know about the dangers of this particular drug I took for the better part of a decade, so I am going to sue you for money because I should be compensated for my ignorance. 

Ergo, PED post retirement compensation will mirror the concussion mess the NFL is dealing with right now. But because these drugs were legal, the lawsuits would be in the hundreds of thousands as opposed to the thousands.

Okay so legalizing performance enhancing drugs doesn't work, yet trying to irradiate them from professional sports is neither practical nor possible. 

The same way that kids will always try to find a way to get some form of high illegally professional athletes will try to utilize some method to gain a competitive advantage. Kobe Bryant can go to Germany to get his blood spun in some machine which nobody knows how it works  to completely rejuvenate his destroyed body, but Roger Clemens can't get injected with testosterone, or HGH, or whatever he used. Both are performance enhancing methods, yet Kobe's was not deemed illegal because...

The method of determining which methods of performance enhancing drugs are legal and which ones aren't has not been properly explained to everyone. To the casual viewer what a guy can do to enhance his performance and what they can't do remain unclear and vague. 

Still even if these methods are determined rationally and everyone knows which drugs they can and cannot use to enhance performance, athletes are always going to find illegal methods to try and gain a competitive edge. Biological passports or not, somebody is going to find a way to beat the system. 

Ultimately that form of testing will be perceived as ineffective because it didn't catch everybody. Therefore we are left with three options either legalize the PED's and initiate a legal drug race. Spend millions of dollars and make earth shattering rules that make PED's illegal; only to wait until somebody beats the best form of testing for the upteempth time and a cheater who we find to be 'great' breaks the hearts of millions again. Or maintain the status quo of PED profiling.

All of those options suck. Since there is no good answer to the PED question at this time, the easiest move is for sports fans to close their eyes, take deep breaths, and transport themselves to a place where athletes can do superhuman things on command.