Star Chicago Bears wideout Brandon Marshall might have just uncovered professional sports’ latest drug scandal. It’s not steroids. It’s not weed or coke. It’s not painkillers.
It’s Viagra.
“I’m fortunate enough to be blessed with size and some smarts to give me my edge,” said Marshall, before getting to his point that gives the word choice of “size” in that first sentence a whole new meaning. “But some guys, they’ll do whatever they can to get an edge. I’ve heard of some crazy stories. I’ve heard (of) guys using, like, Viagra, seriously.”
Marshall said the advantage could be the fact that Viagra can work as a blood thinner. Then again, so does Aspirin.
This raises many questions, none of which are particularly enticing to think about. But someone has to do it.
What is the advantage of Viagra on the football field? The players wear pretty tight pants. In the situation that the little blue pills do their job, it seems it would create a pretty obvious disadvantage to being able to do what they’re supposed to do: run and stuff. They do a lot of running. On the topic of said tight pants, you’d think the general football watching population, what with their massive HD TVs and all, would’ve caught on to this by now. You can see a lot of detail on HD TV. A lot. It could also mean that there’s a really good reason that NFL players seem to own an incredible amount of big SUVs and sports cars.
Will this eventually lead to fines or suspensions? There are millions of people who watch NFL football every week. Let’s say on Monday Night Football, a nationally televised event, that instead of Janet Jackson’s infamous nipple slip, one camera guy accidentally points out that there’s a player, well, pointing. The scores of innocent, all-American children who would be scarred deeply and terribly for life, eventually huddling in a run-down apartment as far away from the great American pastime as possible, could seriously crush the national identity into the ground. Maybe Roger Goodell might need to get hard on this kind of drug use.
But for those who know football, this may be the biggest question of all: Are the centers in the NFL using? For the layman, the center is the guy who snaps the ball to the quarterback. When a quarterback is “under center,” as they say, he often has his hands right up against his underside. One more thing in the way and there could be a lot of botched snaps going on. Also, perhaps, there could be a lot of quarterbacks finding things out about themselves they never knew.
Or maybe we’re just going to see a lot more shotgun formations. But if this tells us anything, we can be sure that the NFL is filled with a lot of stand up guys.
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Matt Williams is a writer and musician with a decent fantasy football team. Follow him on Twitter @WaterInHell .
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