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Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Winter 2009 by Schrotenboer, Brent

Exhaustive report links 185 pro football players to steroids

Major League Baseball spent an estimated $20 million on its Mitchell Report, which named 85 players who had used steroids and other banned substances since 1993.

Shortly after the report s release in December 2007, I posed a question to my editor, Chuck Scott. Suppose we did a Mitchell Report on the NFL?

I thought I could do it for a lot less than $20 million. I might not have the same resources that such money could buy, but I told Scott that I could probably come up with more names linked to such drug use in the NFL through the years.

But it wasn't easy.

Although the Mitchell Report criticized the effectiveness of baseball's drug-testing program, the NFL, to its credit, has been testing its players longer than any other professional sports league in America. It also announces suspensions of players who violate its policy for steroids and related substances. But these announcements have come in dribs and drabs over a period of decades - maybe a half dozen per year that were individually released. Publicizing the information this way is in the league's interest because it makes each incident seem isolated.

Our goal was to provide the macro view over time - to assemble a list of players who not only were suspended for steroids but also admitted using them or were directly linked to such drug usage in other ways, such as in public records or media reports. Once we compiled a list, we wanted to make it as accessible for readers as possible, along with providing some historical context and interpretation.

But first came the hard part: compiling the list.

Because such information only has come out individually over a span of decades, rounding it up turned out to be painstaking. It existed in no single source. I ended up pulling old newspapers from as far back as 1 974, calling former players from the 1980s and checking old public records for details.

I also plunged into newspaper article databases and archives for hours on end and used various word formulas for searches based on Boolean logic. It v/as like fishing in the Pacific. Sometimes I'd run a search that would turn up a bunch of new names. Sometimes I'd run a search that would turn up a thousand articles but only a few new names.

Those last few obscure names among those thousand articles were the sweetest. I knew that if this project were going to be worthwhile for readers, it wouldn't be easy to compile. It couldn't be something you could do even with a thousand Google searches.

I ended up with a list of 1 85 names which was made up of players at every position and from virtually every year during the past three decades. (That, in fact, constituted the lede to the introductory story.) The list contained 52 former Pro Bowl players and four pro football Hall of Famers.

We knew it never could be comprehensive, but the list was enough of a snapshot to examine the issue from a variety of story angles.

One angle was the list itself. We knew it would draw the most reader interest because people identify with and recognize teams and players. The list also represented a compilation of individual stories and a giant overarching history.

One problem, though, was that the list of 185 names, with detailed capsules on each case, measured 140 column inches. Scott told me we wouldn't be able to get it all in the paper, not to mention the accompanying stories that put the list into perspective.

What to do? We settled on just running the list of names in print with no detailed capsules. Scott and I turned to a multimedia specialist in sports, Nicole Vargas, to create an interactive database on the Web site to hold all of the individual information sortable by team.

Additionally, we also would run a full-text version of the list with the individual case details online to make it as accessible as possible for readers.

Another big challenge was giving the list context and interpreting it.

Information is more accessible than ever. But perhaps the most compelling reason for keeping journalists employed these days is that despite the plethora of information surrounding us, we still need somebody to find it, pull it all together, synthesize it, break new ground with it and explain why it's relevant.

That was the trick here.

So what did the list really say? That was one story. The list showed that the league's performance-enhancing drug problem dated to the 1 960s, involved players of all talent levels and could be traced back to several championship teams. It also showed that although the NFL had been ahead of the curve in addressing the problem, serious issues and perceived loopholes remained.

The final package for the newspaper ended up with five components: the list, a timeline and three stories. It's available online at www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20080921/ news_1 s21 nflmai.html.

The sidebar stories were generated in the course of digging up the names. One originated with a question: Why does the problem of performance-enhancing drugs in the NFL not seem to spark the same level of public outrage as with baseball and Barry Bonds? Here we had a list of 1 85 names and 52 Pro Bowlers, far more names than the Mitchell Report on baseball, but did anybody care? That sidebar theorized that steroid use was considered acceptable in the NFL because it didn't provide an obvious cheating advantage and players were expected to be big and strong to make it, no matter how.