Is Jake Scott a Witch? HGH Testing in the NFL
Pro Football Talk put up an interesting post, courtesy of Terry McCormick of TitanInsider.com regarding how Titans’ guard Jake Scott feels about HGH (illegal human growth hormone, baseball’s biggest enemy) testing’s placement in the newly unveiled CBA. Long story short, he’s not a fan. Scott even mentioned how he doesn’t want the HGH testing to be turned into a “witch hunt”. Which begs the question, is Jake Scott a witch?
In all seriousness this a good issue to talk about and I’m glad Scott brought it up. From the owners perspective, HGH is a non-sanctioned drug that needs to be tested for. If some players are illegally taking this drug to improve their play, then they need to be punished–expect the first few to get the Michael Vick treatment, AKA more than necessary but enough to get everyone’s public attention brought to the issue and use the player as an example. This should leave no one surprised when the first few are caught–and they will be.
The owners need this to be tested or the league will turn into baseball. The records will be a sham and all that fun negativity will go along with it. The league will more than likely lose fans and the teams that have a player on HGH on their roster will be frowned upon and get the burden of a negative stigma for year and years, even if it was just one player taking the drug just once. This will be a no-go for the NFL, coincidentally Scott called the testing a “no-go” back in March. Actually, it’s not a coincidence, I just used it on purpose.
The problem seems to lie in the testing itself, where Scott brings up a valid point.
“I would question the motives of any company that is testing for profit, that is operating a for-profit business. Their incentive is to catch people,” Scott said. “That’s their incentive — is to catch people, and if they don’t catch anybody, nobody thinks their tests works. There’s a conflict of interest there.”
Think about it. He’s right. The NFL will want to catch somebody, or else they don’t know for sure that the test works. You may think to yourself, “Self, someone must test for this already” and if you did think that, you’re probably right, but do you want to use the MLB’s testing squads? No. The Olympics have been brought up before and they would probably have the right people in place to handle such a grand operation as this. Hopefully they get it worked out. Time will tell, but after reading Scott’s argument, I’ve determined it comes more from an intellectual argument rather than being the paranoid HGH user, or ‘witch’.
Pro Football Talk went on to mention that the issue isn’t fully settled yet, although the CBA is complete. Look for this to end soon, I hope.