PED's in Sports and How It's Looked at Different in the MLB and the NFL

With the latest in the Ryan Braun saga and having the 50-game suspension lifted, I started thinking more about this story. Being the first person to successfully challenge a drug-related penalty in a grievance was a shock to me.

I've looked over what took place with the sample and why Braun was successful in winning this grievance, and it doesn't make much sense to me. His sample tested positive for elevated testosterone, but because the "protocol" was not followed properly it completely wipes out the dirty test. 

Dino Laurenzi Jr. recently released a statement about how he went about collecting Braun's sample and what steps who took to send the sample off. He followed the protocol of his company and had done the same with hundreds of other players before Braun. It just doesn't add up to me how you can just throw out the evidence even when the seal was never broken or tampered with. 

But this got me thinking about how performing enhancing drugs are viewed in Major League Baseball as opposed to the National Football League. It just seems like the media makes more of an uproar over an athlete in MLB testing positive for PEDs than the NFL. Is it because there hasn't been a big name player in the NFL to ever test positive for PEDs? What if Tom Brady tested positive? 

I know more people concentrate on statistics more in baseball than they do in football, and that might have something to do with it. When you look at home runs in baseball, is it really the same as it was after Mark McGwire broke Roger Maris' record? It has hurt the sport so much that the numbers that players are putting up now are being questioned about whether any successful player is on some sort of PED. 

Football is really more about winning championships than individual statistics. Maybe that, and football is more of a barbaric sport and we as fans don't care as much about PEDs in this sport. When you think of the top players to play in the NFL, you usually think about how many rings they have. When comparing NFL greats, it's more about championships than passing yards.

Overall it just seems like there are so different point of views when it comes down to PEDs in these two sports. I'd really like to see how the public would react if a major NFL star were caught with a positive test, and how it would compare to what McGwire and Rafael Palmerio experienced.