At least part of the problem is that as a society we really haven't decided that performance enhancing drugs are not okay, just that certain ones are not okay, just as certain recreatonal drugs (alcohol, caffeine, nicotine) are legal, and others are not.

Speaking of caffeine, it has a strange status in sports. Many people use it as a performance enhancing drug (I remember reading articles encouraging its use as such), and it's legal to use up to a particular level. A little caffeine speed-effect is okay, but too much is not okay.

Alberto Salazar attributed his successful comeback in the early 90s to his use of Prozac™. No outcry followed.

Willis Reed used Cortizone in order to play in the NBA finals, and people didn't bat an eye, and people still use pain killers of various sorts to help them perform when they otherwise wouldn't be able to.

I can guarantee you that any any ultramarathon there will be plenty of ibuprofen floating around. In my first 24-hour run, I felt the strongest in miles 80-105 after downing several ibuprofen tablets. Nobody suggested my performance wasn't legitimate because of the drugs I used.

Ibuprofen has even been linked to cases of kidney failure, yet, as far as I know, there has been no move to ban its use in sports.

We really need to have a discussion about what constitutes an illegal performance-enhancing drug, and why some should be allowed, and others disallowed.

Foreman spent ages 28-38 eating cheeseburgers, preaching and building a church.

...and producing sons named George.

As I understand it, it's only intentional grounding when the ball is thrown in order to avoid an imminent sack. Spiking is not done to avoid a sack, it's done to stop the clock. Similarly, if all of the receivers are covered, the quarterback can also throw the ball away if there's not a defender draped over him.

As for onside kicks, the receiving team doesn't need to touch the ball. I suppose it's not impossible that the kicking team's players could run under the ball and catch it, but it would likely have to be a very high kick, and the kicking team's players still need to avoid being blocked running downfield.

My recollection is that onside kicks used to always be on the ground, but in the past few years I've seen some pop-up onside kicks.

I know this is off-topic (but, hey, at least it's about football), but it's as good a time as any to bring up my pet peeve. Why did the descriptive term "wide receiver" get replaced by the non-descriptive, redundant "wide out"?

Wide receiver was a perfectly good term--it describes where the player lines up, wide, and what he does, receives. Wide out describes where the player lines up, wide, and where he lines up, out. If we have wide outs, shouldn't we also have narrow outs, or perhaps wide ins?

Perhaps the term wide out would be okay if it described a player who is normally a tight end lining up as a wide receiver, in which case it would describe his body type, wide, and where he lines up, out.

Some of the other nomenclature changes, though they took a little getting useful, are actually improvements--"false start" actually describes the event that just took place, whereas "illegal procedure" sounds more like standard Bush administration policy. "Illegal block in the back" says what happened, while "clipping" sounds like a haircut (and the old signal, a chopping motion toward the back of the leg, always seemed to suggest the player had thrown himself at back the players legs).

We return you now to the regularly scheduled King Kaufman discussion.

I know King is big on Proposed Rule Changes That Will Never Happen, so here's one more: Limit the number of punts allowed to each team--perhaps one per half--that would limit all teams in most games (I looked at last year's stats, and the league averaged 4.7 punts per game, with a low of 3.1 per game (St. Louis) and a high of 6.7 per game (San Francisco)).

This would add a strategic element, and would also lead to more scoring, yet it would not totallly take away the punt. I suspect that both third and fourth down conversion rates would go up--third down conversions because there would be less pressure on third down, and fourth down conversions because it would be less of a novelty, and there would also be less pressure--in the current situation there is more pressure on the offense in fourth down situations, because it is such an unusual situation.

We'd probably also see, at least in the short-term, an increase in the number of fake punts. I suspect that could be a short-lived phenomenon, as its effectiveness would likely decrease quickly.

Pretty funny that Bill O'Reilly doesn't know that Tao is pronounced "Dow".

I'm just picturing him seeing posters for the band Tao Jones and scratching his head.

The teaser says the author was strutting poolside while wearing a Speedo.

I get to the end of the article, and it turns out the author was suffering all of his angst over wearing a Speedo while swimming laps.

I don't think of Portland, Oregon as a hotbed of the fashion avant garde, but when I started lap swimming in 1989 the vast majority of male lap-swimmers wore Speedos, including me, the scrawny runner. This wasn't in the trendy athletic clubs, either, this was in a public pool in the basement of a local grade school.

What this article really needed was Graham Chapman, as The Commander, to come in halfway through and say "Allright, Mr. Broudy, stop this article, it's much too silly!" and stop the article.