More and more evidence that "school" and "athletic factory" are two equivalent concepts...

Biogenesis fallout has included an Outside the Lines article on Friday which indicates that the Florida Biogenesis clinic, tied to numerous athletes with illegal performance-enhancing steroids and other illegal drugs, has been catering to high-school sophomores, juniors, and seniors (16 and 17 year olds, at least), many of them with the full knowledge of their parents.

Several of them were even seen being taken to the clinic by their fathers!

The head of Biogenesis, Tony Bosch, is not licensed (hence, illegal in and of himself), and HGH and other illegal performance-enhancing steroids were documented as being dispensed.

Should this be surprising to anybody, disgusting as it is?

First, let's get this out of the way right now.  In light of some of the recent developments (starting with Ryan Braun's "suspension"), Victor Conte (the founder of the infamous BALCO Labs) stated to FOX Sports' JT the Brick on July 23 that he believed that close to half of all professional athletes were on illegal performance-enhancing drugs.

Would it be too large a leap to basically say that our sports culture in this country, should this even be close to true, is inextricably tied to drugs, and that drugs run sports, at all levels?  A number of years ago on 20/20, Conte said that the only option people had was to legalize PEDs, because that would be the only way to ensure any part of a level playing field.

Second, an answer to the last question of the article:  Porter Fischer, a former Biogenesis employee, posed the question "What kind of parent wants their child taking this kind of stuff?"

A parent who wants a child in the NFL.

A parent who bore the child to "take care of them" in their old age.

A parent who wants "The Good Life", and wants his child's work to provide it for him.

Do you really want me to go on, Mr. Fischer?

Basically, a parent who wants to whore their kid.

It would not be a huge leap, especially for the types of families in Florida who've been effectively financed through illegal drug and gang payments to their sons for playing youth football games that the gangs and drug lords gamble on, to state that the kids were born simply to make a few extra bucks, be it on the welfare check or on some other means.

Many of these boys might well have been playing some form of professional for-pay football for several years, and that's if we are to believe they've only been at Biogenesis at 16 and 17 years old.

So it would not surprise me at all that parents were openly taking their kids to be drugged with this shit.

Hell, most people in this kind of sports today would say that it would be the only way to be competitive, and, in fact, it would be too dangerous to play football without using PEDs.

Several big Biogenesis developments are due soon:

• One report (hat-tip to my anonymous friend) indicates the rest of the baseball suspensions may come out, and that Alex Rodriguez will have his career materially ended this week.  The suspension for A-Fraud/A-Roid appears to be at least a full season plus the rest of this one.
• The whistle-blowers who aided in the OTL report indicate they have clients in the NCAA, NBA, boxing, tennis, and MMA.

But Awful Announcing does pose a real question:

Does anyone really care?

First off,  I think it's stronger than Matt Yoder puts it in the article:

"The groupthink on this basically goes like this - A) We don't care about steroids, B) We just want to enjoy baseball in peace and don't care who or who isn't cheating and/or C) Quit trying to scare us about scary drugs."

Especially if Conte's statement is close to true, there would be no meaningful sports at all in this country, at basically any level, without performance-enhancing drugs.

That, in fact, drugs run sports, and drugs ARE sports.

(And then you combine this with the news that OTL itself is being demoted to ESPN2 with a less-than-favorable timeslot (effectively, so it's ratings can disintegrate to the point of cancellation), because we can't have this degree of truth without basically being forced to disintegrate the entire Sports Machine out there.)

Second, when you combine this with the complete animal-pack/gang mentality of many fans, especially those who will swear fealty to their sport above their own lives (much less anyone else's!), you get to a very ugly conclusion that, given the choice, most fans would literally trade anything (their own lives, their friends, the sanity of any or all of the above, that the team is on illegal drugs, taking illegal payments, fixed games, etc. and so forth and so on) just to get that one championship high that will make everything better in their lives -- increase their pay, improve their love life, etc. and so forth -- or so they think.

When you get that kind of morality going on, it becomes easy to see where fans would openly and deliberately interfere with their own and everyone else's lives just to get the one thing which identifies them, Sports Fan Syndrome, as Howard Cosell put it.

So look at this in that realm:  Parents literally whoring their kids and pumping them with PEDs to try to get them to The Show so that they can "get paid", as it were...

At that point, little to nothing should surprise you.