The SEC Might Get A Uniform Drug-Testing Policy, Which Is Dumb

Some SEC school officials have been pushing for the implementation of a conference-wide substance-abuse policy, a move that would regulate the testing and punishment policies for every school in the conference. Why are they doing this? Because they are sore losers.

As it stands now, each school is free to decide how often it wants to test its athletes for recreational drug use (marijuana, cocaine, etc.) as well as how severely it wants to punish those athletes that do test positive. That's exactly how it should be. School officials should be free to decide how much of a shit they do or do not give about whether their athletes are smoking weed on the weekends (steroid testing, on the other hand, is handled by the NCAA).

But some don't see it that way. From ESPN:

Some SEC athletic directors and coaches, who didn't want to be quoted, think that certain schools have "competitive advantages" based on how frequently—or infrequently—they test or how many games student-athletes miss for positive tests.

That part about those doing the kvetching not wanting to be quoted is key. What we most likely have here is a situation in which the athletic directors and coaches from a few schools are regretting that their university's testing policy is more stringent than those employed by some of their conference rivals, but are unwilling to admit as much publicly or scale back their own policies for fear of looking like they put winning football games ahead of integrity. Instead, they are trying to get this potential blanket policy to do all of the work for them and level the playing field.

In other words, the people pushing for this policy were probably narcs back in high school.

[ ESPN]