Reason #600 Football Trumps Baseball

You're going to hear about a lot of football happenings over the next few weeks. Some will have a long-lasting impact on your fantasy football league (such as an injury that may cause last season's sack king to miss this season). Some will have almost no impact whatsoever in the long run (such as a certain quarterback's attitude toward training camp). The impact of others will fall somewhere in the middle (LenDale White, anyone?).

Meanwhile, while we wait for the real football games to start and for NASCAR to drop the green flag on its latest race -- hint, hint, vote on the People's Pitstop lineup before Friday evening -- you may have heard that a certain baseball player reached a certain milestone this week. A lot of people are going to see this as a reason to celebrate that baseball player, but we at the People's Pigskin see this as a reason to celebrate something else.

Football.

That's right. Football, the sport that last visited Yankee Stadium during the Alan Ameche era.

For one thing, it's a reminder that the National Football League, for all its faults and failings -- and they are plenty -- got the issue of performance enhancers right.

Step into the Wayback Machine for a trip to 2006, when we learned that Shawne Merriman, one of the NFL's defensive stars at the time, had taken performance-enhancing drugs. Did we learn about it from reading a former teammate's tell-all book? Did we learn about it from an exclusive interview with Rich Eisen? No, we learned about it when the NFL said that it would be suspending Merriman four games (and taking away four game checks) after he failed an NFL test.

There was a swift test, a swift result and a swift and real punishment. Merriman didn't just face a nebulous sense of public shame for what he did. He lost a quarter of his salary for that season. He even became the namesake of a rule barring such players from the Pro Bowl.

And that type of tangible punishment is reflected in another difference between baseball and other sports: a historical record free of question marks.

The NFL's all-time leading rusher is Emmitt Smith, and its all-time leading receiver is Jerry Rice. Both Smith and Rice will be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday. Does anyone suspect them of using shortcuts to get there?

The NBA's all-time leading scorer is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who, for bonus points, is also featured in one of the funniest movies ever. Does anyone suspect him of using shortcuts?

The holder of just about every NHL record that does not involve goaltending is Wayne Gretzky. Does anyone suspect him of using shortcuts?

Now let's look at baseball's home run record. The current holder of that record not only is suspected of cheating, but he stands accused of lying to a federal grand jury about it. The person whom most expect to take that record is already on the record saying he cheated during the three-year period leading up to his trade to his current employer. And instead of being punished for his transgressions, he's been rewarded with the opportunity to perform on one of the biggest stages in sports.

Don't you feel better knowing that the biggest questions facing your fantasy team probably involve holdouts or Kardashians?