Fair enough, but going to that length to pass the test at least suggests the NFL is serious about the subject. Which doesn’t mean that it’s totally effective, but widespread (detectable) steroid use under a serious testing program seems unlikely. I guess HGH is a good possibility.
I think modern training techniques and nutrition, as well as a greater scouting effort to find freaks, is a sufficient explanation.
Mine shrink in the wash. Or maybe I’m just getting bigger.
Here’s an interesting article on the early days of steroids in the NFL. Much earlier than I would have thought. There was nothing illegal about it at the time so it can’t be considered as cheating. I don’t know when they became illegal.
I don’t watch football at all. How fast do players usually run/sprint?
The fastest players can run 40 meters in about 4.1 or 4.2 seconds, the really big guys take over 5 seconds to do it - that’s with a running start I think. I don’t have a cite for this part but I’ve heard that world-class sprinters cover 40 meters in a little over 3 seconds if they have a running start.
The 40 yard dash typically isn’t measured by a running start, and the fastest NFL players typically come in in the 4.25-4.3 range. The big guys range from around 4.8 to 5.3.
I started doubting myself right after posting :smack:
Any idea how much player speeds have changed over the years? I’ve never seen anything regarding that.
Mark Schlereth was an offensive lineman. He now weighs 205 lbs. His theory as to why heavy became the norm?
I haven’t read all the posts so maybe this has already been mentioned.
Up until some in the late60s/early70s offensive linemen couldn’t extend there arms, it was an automatic holding call. Being very mobile was more important than being very strong (not that strong wasn’t important, it just wasn’t as useful as being very quick).
When they changed the rule, upper body strength, i.e. the ability to push a defensive lineman, became much more important. If you look at most blocking by linemen today, expecially pass rush blocking, you can see it’s done mostly with the arms.
I’m not sure about now, but at one point the amount of testosterone that someone needed in their body to set off a positive test with the NFL was something like 100 times the natural level. I’m not going to be as cynical as to say that the testing was a publicity stunt, but you can draw your own conclusions.
Besides, as we’ve seen in cycling or baseball, the presence of tests doesn’t mean the sport is clean, especially when you consider that HGH still isn’t tested for at all.
This poster would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that the person who made it is an illiterate moron who doesn’t know the difference between “its” and “it’s.”
Incidentally, sentences and proper nouns are supposed to start with capital letters.
As to the OP, there’s really one big reason:
Money.
No, money doesn’t make you bigger, unless you eat a lot of it. However, it is worth noting that the rapid size increase of football players (and baseball players, and in fact basketball players and hockey players) has grown at exactly the same time that professional sports in North America has seen an enormous growth in revenue.
Pro sports have always been about the money, but since the late 1970s they’ve been about a lot more money than they used to be. Income tax cuts, higher salaries at the top end of the economic spectrum and more disposable income in the upper middle class have resulted in major increases in demand for big time sports. As a result, the revenues of the big sports leagues (and major NCAA conferences as well) have jumped upwards. So there’s way more money at stake than there used to be.
Correspondingly, all up and down the chain, from high school and junior sports to the pros, more emphasis is being put on scouting, training, and coaching. Say what you want about 'roids, but 30 years ago, baseball players didn’t even do serious weight training (or most of them didn’t; those who did, like Steve Carlton, were widely regarded as weirdos.) What training, nutrition and health knowledge there was in pro sports 30, 35 years ago would be considered medieval by today’s standards. Scouting is being emphasized more than it used to be; teams put more money into it because they have more money and stand to make more money from a successful draft, so there’s less chance now that a top offensive guard will be overlooked. Nutrition is better. Sports medicine is better. Teams now have a better chance to find and promote the big guys, to keep them healthy or return them to health if they are injured, and to increase their size as much as possible. All of this has happened, IMHO, because there’s just a lot more money at stake, so the resources available to find and develop the best talent are greater, and the motivation to do so is greater.
And yes, the steroids are better, but the truth is we’d see much bigger, stronger players even without steroids.
No one has touched on the single most important factor – the prevelance of single-platoon football at the time. Most starters played both offense and defense, so the aerobic capacity required of the players precluded huge body sizes.
Of course, then, as now, big-and-athletic tended to win out over small-and-athletic at certain positions. But big-and-athletic guys in the 1940s were topping out at around 230 lbs or so (and yes, there were always bigger outliers).
Throughout the early-to-mid 1950s, single-platoon football gave way to the double-platoon football we’re used to today. Change was rapid – the last regular two-way starter in the NFL, former Eagle C-MLB Chuck Bednarik, retired in 1962.
With the reduced aerobic load of playing football, the athletes could get bigger and still compete. The usage of steroids and other such drugs are the modern means of gaining size, but they were not the original impetus of the body-type changes in football.
This reminds me of a story about when Scott Stevens was a rookie defenseman for the Washington Capitols and the training staff made him stop lifting weights because they were worried it would make him too bulky and slow. He kept lifting in his own time and obviously didn’t suffer from it but that type of thinking is almost unheard of today ~25 years later.
I think it was Bryant Gumbel’s “Real Sports.” He did a report on the large size of players (I only remember the NFL portion) and how unhealthy it was in the long run.
My childhood hero, Harmon Killebrew, says that when he was with the Twins, he briefly dabbled in weightlifting. when the front office found out, they read him the Riot Act, and threatened to fine him if he didn’t stop. Why? There was a widespread fear in those days that a player might get “muscle-bound,” and wouldn’t be able to hit.
RickJay’s point is spot on. Steroids are undoubtedly widespread, BUT… when I was a kid, the NFL season was just 12 weeks long, and paychecks weren’t very big. In the Sixties, a LOT of the guys who used to play for the Dallas Cowboys were selling insurance or cars or real estate on the side, to make ends meet. In THOSE days, summer training camp was a must, because many of thee guys hadn’t been working out in months. They NEEDED camp to get back into playing shape.
Today? Even the benchwarmers make so much money that they can afford to work out and train for hours every day, even in the off-season.
Bob Lilly played at 250-260 pounds in his prime… but today, he’d probably be a lot bigger, because he’d be pumping iron daily, all year round, instead of spending December through June in an office.
Whoa! Are you sure about that? I know the average on the OL at UGA in '92 was over 300lbs.
