Friday, June 7, 2002

ProFootballWeekly.com asks personnel expert Joel Buchsbaum for his thoughts on the hottest topics in football. 

Bigger, faster players lead to more injuries in NFL

The NFL, which has banned anabolic steroids for years, recently added ephedra to its list of banned substances. The league is also cracking down on players who endorse products containing substances banned by the NFL. The topic of steroids has come to the forefront of debate since a report was published revealing the widespread use of steroids in baseball. Buchsbaum explores how the steroid epidemic and use of supplements has affected football.

Buchsbaum: When Chuck Noll coached the Steelers, especially in the 1970s, he had a philosophy that bigger isn’t necessarily better, and he generally fielded the smallest, healthiest teams in the NFL. Noll’s theory was that players who add unnatural size to their frames were much more susceptible to injuries and much less flexible — meaning if you have a 250-pound man who was weighing 270 pounds, he had 20 pounds of unnatural size. Noll believed that with excellent technique, good knee bend and leverage, players could overcome a lack of size and be healthier and more athletic at a lighter weight. During the ’70s, Noll won four Super Bowls using this philosophy. Whether it would have worked in the ’80s is very hard to say because the Steelers had such a poor drafting record at the end of the ’70s and early ’80s, when they were picking at the end of rounds and experimenting with players like Greg Hawthorne, who really didn’t have much talent.

Some people say that the need for size increased dramatically, especially on the offensive line, when the NFL changed the passing rules and made holding and wrestling by offensive linemen almost legal. With the need for size on the offensive line, it also increased the need for size on the defensive line. But nobody has really put Noll’s theory to the test in recent years. If they did, it would be interesting to see what would happen with the injury situation in the NFL.

Another problem may be that the athletes are training in the weight room so hard year-round that their bodies do not get adequate rest and break down much more frequently. All I know is that the end result — with all of these supplements that players are taking and the use of steroids, which still does go on in some cases, and the use of human growth hormone, which might be much more widespread than people realize and may have much more dramatic consequences than the players know — has led to a bigger but not better NFL, with so many injuries that very often you see half a second team out on the field.

If you don’t think steroids, human growth hormone and supplements such as creatine and extensive bodybuilding lead to injuries, just look at the size of the average NBA and major-league baseball player and note how many more of those athletes are injured and go on injured reserve every year than used to be there in the ’60s, ’70s and early ’80s, when weightlifting was almost a taboo subject in those sports.

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