With respect to the NFL’s whole drug use/disciplinary policy – it’s time for the league to stop propagating its antiquated, bullshit Leave It To Beaver imagery that everyone knows is a bald-faced lie.

I have a difficult time believing that Adderall really enhances performance. If anything (in a sports setting with physical exertion) it can make you too jumpy and less able to act instinctively or intuitively. Superior physical ability and instincts/training are what separate the great player from the average one. In hockey they have a saying “the average player goes to where the puck is, the great player goes where the puck will be”. The combination of physical exertion and over-stimulation can impair decision-making and the ability to react instinctively. At least that has been my personal experience with ADHD meds.

I don’t know specifics behind JG’s latest suspension, Adderall or other drug use. I can only assume Adderall wasn’t prescribed by a doctor or he would not have been suspended. But ongoing (therapeutic) doses of Adderall and marijuana use may be prescribed as treatment for a host of social-anxiety disorders that have reportedly plagued Josh Gordon from childhood. I realize there may be many other drugs and circumstances that render my thoughts as somewhat off base. But I wonder if this is REALLY about a bunch of Ward Cleaver-type NFL owners – whose understanding of pharmaceutical drug therapy is pulled directly from their 1960’s HS chemistry books – simply trying to maintain complete control of the league’s drug-use policy at all costs. And said owners being unwilling to have an intelligent dialogue about this issue out of fear the “inmates may end up running the prison ” (Bob McNair, Oct. 2017). It’s possibly that Josh Gordon is being made an example – with the implied threat that challenging league/owner diktats in any manner will be a career-ending move. Just ask Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid. No real benefit can become AG from this latest suspension – unless your real goal is to keep other “inmates” in line at all costs.

Unfortunately, the NFLPA literally ceded this issue to Roger Goodell in the latest CBA – Ward Cleaver law applies. The milk-toast autocrats propagate their own outdated, indifferent and ineffectual “standards” at will. So players’ only recourse would be judicial. There are probably many circuit courts with a sympathetic ear regarding NLFPA’s argument against the NFL’s circumvention of state laws regarding random drug testing. Rest assured said courts would likely rule in favor of the players.

The more I look at the NFL, the more I think it needs to be burned to the ground. Sounds far-fetched, but with favorable court rulings the CBA could be neutered and the league (in its current form) would cease to exist. A new business model would be established. One where NFL owners are driven from their plantations once and for all. Team ownership structure is more “Green Bay Packer like” and less “Jerry Jones like”. A model where players have the same rights enjoyed by and fought for by millions of workers in this country – and protection from the despots that so desperately want to control them.