Before it gets too old I want to bring you this very good article by Dayn Perry of Baseball Prospectus. He really makes a great case — basically asking why baseball gets bogged down in the steroid controversy (amongst others) while the sport featuring small truck-sized, 400 lb. monsters, running like track athletes gets off scot free and remains America’s pastime.

He begins by illustrating how badly the NFL treats it’s own players….

First, in comparing the two industries, there’s the noisome labor structure of the NFL. It’s the most violent of major professional team sports (more on that in a moment), and it’s the one that’s most structurally hostile toward its workforce. Mostly, this is the fault of the NFLPA and Gene Upshaw, who’s less a fire-eyed labor leader than an obedient valet to the owners. So, we’ve got a league that has a salary cap and non-guaranteed contracts. It’s tempting to view the outgrowths of labor-management negotiations as value-neutral and beyond some common range of moral understanding. If those subject to the NFLPA’s terminal ankle-grabbing were, say, actuaries, schoolteachers, or lawyers, then perhaps that would be true. But professional football players have dangerous jobs. Whether it’s the cumulative harm absorbed or the single, transformative incident—a crack-back block, a blind side sack, or a receiver simply going across the middle—the NFL player’s gladiatorial existence means he should be entitled to more safeguards. But the owners won’t give it to him, and the union won’t fight for it on his behalf.

Then he gets into how badly the NFL treats the rest of the world.

It’s football’s sanctioned violence that urges so many players to seek such self-destructive edges over their rivals for roster spots and opponents on the field, and it’s also that sanctioned violence that leads to violent tendencies among players, even at the lower levels. It doesn’t take an accomplished theorist to surmise that, in the NFL, the scourge of domestic violence is an echo of those early tendencies. While no major sport does an exemplary job of punishing domestic violence, the NFL stands out as a main offender. In 2006, for instance, the Washington Post compiled a non-exhaustive list of NFL player arrests for the year. Of those 41 (!) arrests, five were for various flavors of domestic assault. Those numbers are hardly aberrant. They also don’t include some of the more famous incidents (Warren Moon, Lawrence Phillips, Michael Pittman, and, of course, O.J. Simpson).

Strangely there are no congressional hearings or outside investigative units set up by the NFL to combat these things. The consumers don’t care. Who ends up giving a shit? No one. And so it continues to happen. I don’t get it.