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At one point in time steroid use the NFL was not the dirty little sports secret it is today – it was simply considered along the same lines as most ‘legal’ supplements today. In fact a significant number of NFL offensive and defensive linemen used steroids openly. Yet the MLB has received so much negative publicity from its findings in the use of steroids in baseball, not the NFL.

“I remember the first day of training camp, going into Player X’s dorm room when the vets showed up,” says Brian Baldinger, who played 11 NFL seasons, “A brown bag was dumped out on the bed full of syringes and you name it. And you just kind of grabbed what you needed.”

“It wasn’t like it is now, with baseball players saying, ‘Let’s get the playing field even.’ Back then, it was understood that X-amount of players, mostly linemen, that’s what they did. It wasn’t looked at as a competitive advantage.”

But some time in the 80′s the league in cooperation of the NFLPA, took action to eradicate the use of steroids and in 1987, the NFL became the first professional sports league to test its players for ‘performance enhancing drugs’.

“The NFL was ahead of the curve,” Baldinger says. “It put a big dent in steroid use when they instituted year-round random testing. When you’re testing once a year at the beginning of training camp, it’s pretty easy for guys who are using to get around that. But when they started doing year-round testing, it made it a lot harder. I think it cleaned it up quite a bit.”

But according the the league 43 players have been suspended for violating the NFL’s PED policy over the last 4 years, including prominent players such as Rodney Harrison, New England Patriots safety and most recently Kevin Williams and Pat Williams of the Minnesota Vikings.

Yet there is not the same publicity and outrage with steroid use in the NFL as there is with that of the MLB. Adolpho Birch president of law and labor policy, whom is in charge of the PED prgram feels, “from our perspective, we have been doing this for a long time. We were suspending players when people didn’t care about it. I think if you look at it from a public perception, the one thing they understand is our policy is working and we’re enforcing it as written.”

On the other hand Baseball had just begun testing players in 2003 and didn’t start enforcing repricussions such as suspensions for steroid use until 2005. Perhaps causing fans and the media to focus more on the MLB’s avoidence as they kept from dealing with the issue of steriod use in years past. The MLB has suspended jut 22 players in the last 4 years compared to the 43 of the NFL but undoubtably has some connection with the players union capping random drug testing during the offseason over the past 3 years in a continued effort to hinder performance enhancement testing.