Merriman drops appeal, starts suspension

[joelbolt]

Merriman drops appeal, starts suspension (http://www.nfl.com/teams/story/SD/9767774)
NFL.com wire reports

SAN DIEGO (Oct. 31, 2006) -- Chargers star outside linebacker Shawne Merriman dropped his appeal and will begin serving a four-game suspension for testing positive for steroids this week.

Merriman, who's tied for the NFL lead with 8 1/2 sacks, will miss games at home against Cleveland, at Cincinnati, at Denver and against the Oakland Raiders.

The suspension won't officially begin until after Merriman addresses his teammates on Nov. 1. After that, he'll be barred from the team's headquarters until he's eligible to return on Nov. 27. The Chargers were off Oct. 31.

Had Merriman gone through with the appeal and lost, there was the chance that he'd miss both games against Denver, which is tied with the Chargers for the AFC West lead. The Chargers host the Broncos on Dec. 10.

Merriman, the NFL's Defensive Rookie of the Year in 2005, said the positive drug test stemmed from a tainted supplement.

Word of Merriman's positive test leaked on Oct. 22. Merriman announced Oct. 24 he was appealing, and had three sacks in the team's 38-24 win over the St. Louis Rams.

Merriman's suspension is another blow to one of the NFL's toughest defenses.

Outside linebacker Shaun Phillips and end Igor Olshansky are doubtful for the Cleveland game. Outside linebacker Steve Foley was shot by an off-duty police officer on Sept. 3 and will miss the season.

[canadianfan_51]

its a good choice, play against the rams and not the faiders.
does anyone think less of him since he's pretty much admitting he did take steroids?

[LTfan4life]

does anyone think less of him since he's pretty much admitting he did take steroids?

IMO, it might've been because of that nagging ankle injury earlier in the year that may have caused this. We don't know when he started this though, so I won't judge him for it. He screwed up. He admits it. He doesn't want to be a distraction. I repsect him for making the smart decision.

[TJ21]

Phillips is doubtful? Damn.

[LTfan4life]

Phillips is doubtful? Damn.


:eek:

Polk and Harris as the OLBs?




____________________

[MadMadigan]

its a good choice, play against the rams and not the faiders.
does anyone think less of him since he's pretty much admitting he did take steroids?I Don't, everyone makes mistakes, The team depends on him just like any other starter and this 4 game suspension is a result of his carelessness and that should weigh on his mind, but if he continues to do it thats a different story.

[Smaug]

I didn't realize that he actually tested positive way back on August 2nd.


link (http://www.signonsandiego.com/sports/chargers/20061101-9999-1s1chargers.html)

He has since had three clean tests. This just makes me believe even further that he didn't know that the supplement had steroids in it, and that he will probably win the lawsuit.

[ftwbolt]

Michael Felger Boston Herald (http://patriots.bostonherald.com/patriots/view.bg?articleid=165725) November 5, 2006

The NFL has certainly had its share of embarrassments this year, from Albert Haynesworth’s foot-stomping of Cowboys center Andre Gurode, Adam Jones’ public face-spitting incident and the alleged attempted suicide of Terrell Owens. Here’s one we’d like to add to the list.

The fact that Chargers’ superhuman linebacker Shawne Merriman failed a steroid test in August and then was allowed to play over the ensuing two months as he formulated an appeal, which he as since dropped, is a joke. Yes, everyone deserves due process, but there are seven days between games in the NFL The league couldn’t have taken care of the Merriman issue over a Monday-Friday timeframe?

The league was made to look foolish last week when Merriman basically looked like a video-game character against the St. Louis Rams, vaulting over, around and through various Rams on the way to a three-sack day. And after every bone-jarring hit, Merriman launched into his World Wrestling Entertainment-style dance.

Merriman claims the steroid found in his system, nandrolone, was the result of taking the wrong supplement. Believe that if you want, but the fact is Merriman, by his own admission, had performance-enhancing substances coursing through his veins as he played NFL games. No network announcer would ever point out something this obvious, of course, so we’ll do it for them: Merriman was on steroids!

“I’m not a cheater,” said Merriman, who will serve a four-game suspension starting today. “I don’t believe in cheating the game, I don’t condone cheating the game and I have no reason to cheat the game. I’m about playing football, and I’m a great football player. I will continue to go out and prove that.”

Merriman will be subject to more testing now that he’s failed once, so every one will be able to see just what he is -- or isn’t -- going forward.

[ftwbolt]

http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/story/468277p-394085c.html

Guillermo Mota, a relative nobody except to Mets fans, gets hit this week with a 50-game suspension for steroids, just because that is the way it goes now, even for first offenders. Mota makes some headline because it is some impressive number. Fifty games! That means a third of next season, whether Mota, a free agent, is still pitching for the Mets or somebody else.
Everything about drugs is bigger in baseball, mostly because the sport grew the way it did over the past 10 years. Big bodies, big stats, bigger arms for some of these old power pitchers who miraculously find five miles per hour more on the old fastball, even if nobody has figured out yet what they're taking.

Mota gets hit this way in November, gets hit even harder than the Cardinals hit him in Game 2 of the National League Championship Series, when things really started to get away from the Mets for good.

Shawne Merriman, who is very much in season, is a different story.

Merriman of the Chargers gets clipped for using an illegal anabolic steroid known as nandrolone - industrial-strength juice - right smack in the middle of his season. Merriman, in fact, loses just about half the regular season he has left at a time when the Chargers think they can go to the Super Bowl. The best reason San Diego has is one of the best defenses in the league, organized around Merriman, a star linebacker and a huge hitter.

This would have been like the Yankees suddenly losing Derek Jeter for the month of August, not because of an injury, but because he got caught using drugs. Imagine the headlines something like that would have made.

Merriman, though, made most of his headlines over the last two weeks - outside of San Diego, anyway - because he thought he could somehow beat this rap, blame his problems on a tainted "supplement." From the time word leaked out that he had tested positive, he and his representatives tried to act as if the issue was the news leak and not the drugs. But then these stories never seem as important around the NFL, which occasionally seems to be covered by public defenders. When Merriman played his last game, the TV announcers made him seem braver than "Flags of our Fathers."

You know how Bud Selig is always making people laugh when he says baseball is held to a higher standard on the subject of drugs because of the steroid era that began about 10 years ago? Selig happens to be right. Not because Selig's sport is pure when it comes to drugs. But because baseball doesn't get nearly enough credit for having made the dramatic progress it has made over the past five years, even going up against a Major League Baseball Players Association that would still love to be tougher in this area than the defense of the Chicago Bears.

Is baseball's current plan perfect? Of course not. There won't ever be a perfect plan anywhere, not as long as the cheats have chemists as smart, and sometimes smarter, than the chemists doing the testing; not as long as ballplayers can still get stronger with human growth hormones knowing there is still no accurate test for that.

The NFL? Its drug testing sometimes seems about as difficult to fail as some of the courses some of our "student-athletes" take to stay eligible for college football. Merriman fails it anyway. Then immediately tries to act like some kind of victim.

Just follow the timeline on this, because it's pretty special.

First comes the positive test. Then the appeal. Then Merriman's people run to the media outraged about the leak. Gene Upshaw, who runs the NFL Players Association, makes the same kind of noise. The guys who got caught in BALCO, Bonds and Giambi and Sheffield, wanted it to be about the leaks, too, not about the cheating.

The position of Merriman's reps, remember, was that this was all some kind of huge misunderstanding, that the "supplement" their guy was taking was spiked. Even though NFL players smart enough to operate a video game now have access to a list telling them which "supplements" are acceptable.

So all this drove the story until Merriman dropped the appeal. He dropped it on the condition that he got to address his teammates before he disappeared for a month, maybe so he could give them a Winston Churchill-like pep talk about fighting the rest of the AFC on the beaches of La Jolla until he came back. What a guy.

And that isn't the best part. That came from the Chargers themselves, who issued a release last week that praised Merriman for the "standup" way he had handled all this. Right. As a last resort.

They're all standup guys until they start sitting out their suspensions.

[56lightsout56]

http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/story/468277p-394085c.html

Guillermo Mota, a relative nobody except to Mets fans, gets hit this week with a 50-game suspension for steroids, just because that is the way it goes now, even for first offenders. Mota makes some headline because it is some impressive number. Fifty games! That means a third of next season, whether Mota, a free agent, is still pitching for the Mets or somebody else.
Everything about drugs is bigger in baseball, mostly because the sport grew the way it did over the past 10 years. Big bodies, big stats, bigger arms for some of these old power pitchers who miraculously find five miles per hour more on the old fastball, even if nobody has figured out yet what they're taking.

Mota gets hit this way in November, gets hit even harder than the Cardinals hit him in Game 2 of the National League Championship Series, when things really started to get away from the Mets for good.

Shawne Merriman, who is very much in season, is a different story.

Merriman of the Chargers gets clipped for using an illegal anabolic steroid known as nandrolone - industrial-strength juice - right smack in the middle of his season. Merriman, in fact, loses just about half the regular season he has left at a time when the Chargers think they can go to the Super Bowl. The best reason San Diego has is one of the best defenses in the league, organized around Merriman, a star linebacker and a huge hitter.

This would have been like the Yankees suddenly losing Derek Jeter for the month of August, not because of an injury, but because he got caught using drugs. Imagine the headlines something like that would have made.

Merriman, though, made most of his headlines over the last two weeks - outside of San Diego, anyway - because he thought he could somehow beat this rap, blame his problems on a tainted "supplement." From the time word leaked out that he had tested positive, he and his representatives tried to act as if the issue was the news leak and not the drugs. But then these stories never seem as important around the NFL, which occasionally seems to be covered by public defenders. When Merriman played his last game, the TV announcers made him seem braver than "Flags of our Fathers."

You know how Bud Selig is always making people laugh when he says baseball is held to a higher standard on the subject of drugs because of the steroid era that began about 10 years ago? Selig happens to be right. Not because Selig's sport is pure when it comes to drugs. But because baseball doesn't get nearly enough credit for having made the dramatic progress it has made over the past five years, even going up against a Major League Baseball Players Association that would still love to be tougher in this area than the defense of the Chicago Bears.

Is baseball's current plan perfect? Of course not. There won't ever be a perfect plan anywhere, not as long as the cheats have chemists as smart, and sometimes smarter, than the chemists doing the testing; not as long as ballplayers can still get stronger with human growth hormones knowing there is still no accurate test for that.

The NFL? Its drug testing sometimes seems about as difficult to fail as some of the courses some of our "student-athletes" take to stay eligible for college football. Merriman fails it anyway. Then immediately tries to act like some kind of victim.

Just follow the timeline on this, because it's pretty special.

First comes the positive test. Then the appeal. Then Merriman's people run to the media outraged about the leak. Gene Upshaw, who runs the NFL Players Association, makes the same kind of noise. The guys who got caught in BALCO, Bonds and Giambi and Sheffield, wanted it to be about the leaks, too, not about the cheating.

The position of Merriman's reps, remember, was that this was all some kind of huge misunderstanding, that the "supplement" their guy was taking was spiked. Even though NFL players smart enough to operate a video game now have access to a list telling them which "supplements" are acceptable.

So all this drove the story until Merriman dropped the appeal. He dropped it on the condition that he got to address his teammates before he disappeared for a month, maybe so he could give them a Winston Churchill-like pep talk about fighting the rest of the AFC on the beaches of La Jolla until he came back. What a guy.

And that isn't the best part. That came from the Chargers themselves, who issued a release last week that praised Merriman for the "standup" way he had handled all this. Right. As a last resort.

They're all standup guys until they start sitting out their suspensions.

read the story and then saw it was from a NY rag. Figures,,,,,notice they say nothing about Giambi????? if Merriman was a Giant they'd be writting how outrageous the NFL policies are.

Get over it. there's nothing in Shawn's background that labels him a liar. He gets the benefit for that and lets move on. Bet their still ticked by the sheli trade....

[Sean]

IMO, it might've been because of that nagging ankle injury earlier in the year that may have caused this. We don't know when he started this though, so I won't judge him for it. He screwed up. He admits it. He doesn't want to be a distraction. I repsect him for making the smart decision.

I dont really think less of him he is still one of my favouite players although i am a little disapointed he whent on the juice.:56:

[Sean]

Do you think San Diego will go all the way this year?:21:

[Sean]

i dont think that spot will be reserved much longer:D