The headline in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel proclaims that “Tannehill speaks on Jordan.” Technically, that’s accurate.
But Dolphins quarterback Ryan Tannehill didn’t really say anything about defensive end Dion Jordan, who has been suspended for the first four games of the 2014 season after testing positive for PEDs.
“I haven’t talked to him,” Tannehill said during a youth football camp. “I’ll probably talk to him here pretty soon. It’s an unfortunate situation, but we’re going to be looking forward to him coming back because he was a good player. I think he is getting better the longer he’s here. And we’re going to be excited to have him back.”
While we don’t expect Tannehill or any other player to call out a teammate for cheating, there’s a nonchalance in Tannehill’s words that undermines the reality that Jordan did indeed cheat. And he got caught. And he’ll miss 25 percent of the upcoming season because of it.
Tannehill’s nonchalance matches the nonchalance of fans and the media when it comes to PED use by football players. Whether it’s because there’s an expectation that football players can’t get freakishly large by merely saying their prayers and taking their vitamins or because there’s not a baseball-purist-style obsession with comparing stats from era to era without artificial compounds skewing the samples, people haven’t cared and still don’t care about the use of performance enhancers in football.
Of course, the NFL and NFLPA care about it, which is way stiff penalties are imposed on those caught cheating. But they still don’t care enough about HGH to finalize an agreement for HGH testing.