Mike Celizic

If a major league baseball player charged that 15-20 percent of his colleagues were still using performance-enhancing drugs, and if another player challenged that number as being too low by half, it would be splashed across the front of every sports section and would lead every sports show.

Talk radio would talk about nothing else. Fans would be expressing outrage and disgust and canceling their season tickets. And my friends at MSNBC would be calling to see when I could get down to Secaucus, N.J., to talk about it on television.

So why doesn’t anyone raise an eyebrow when the accusers are football players and the league is the NFL? Where is the outrage? Why the double standard? Is it because baseball players used drugs to break records, and football players use them to get bigger and win games?

These are important questions we should be asking after Jon Jansen, an offensive lineman for the Washington Redskins, made those charges on Bob Costas’ HBO program, “Costas Now.” The drug, he said, is human growth hormone – HGH - for which there is no reliable test. Dana Stubblefield, a retired defensive lineman, said on the same show that he thinks the figure is closer to 30 percent.

HGH is one of the drugs Barry Bonds is accused of having used. And we all know the outrage Bonds and the others who led the recent assault on home-run records inspired. Mark McGwire went from the man who broke Roger Maris’ record and a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer to a virtual outcast in the baseball community. Sammy Sosa, hailed for being the only man to hit 60 or more multiple times, has virtually fallen off the face of the earth. Rafael Palmiero, disgraced by a dirty urine sample, couldn’t have become more  anonymous if he had joined the witness protection program.

NFL 2007 Team-by-team reports, predictions

When baseball’s heroes were accused of jacking their numbers with juice, Congress held hearings and put a blowtorch to the feet of Don Fehr, the head of the players union, and Bud Selig, the commissioner, and didn’t take it away until they agreed to a real testing policy with big-time penalties. If the congressional panel said anything at all about the NFL, it was to praise that league’s drug-testing efforts.

Yet, the NFL was hardly clean, even during the hearings. It was known then that a number of Carolina Panthers had made the acquaintance of a friendly doctor who wrote them regular prescriptions for performance-enhancing drugs leading up to their Super Bowl loss to the Patriots.

NFL games to watch Must-see TV Cowboys-Packers, Pats-Steelers just a few ’07 schedule highlights Getty Images

Every year, a number of players are suspended – usually for four games – for using steroids in the NFL, and they’re hardly mentioned. Fans treat the suspensions no differently than if the player were injured. The only player ever to provoke outrage for a drug suspension is Ricky Williams, and all he did was smoke some pot. The outrage wasn’t over the drugs but over how his actions hurt his team, the Dolphins.

And now come the fresh allegations by Jansen and Stubblefield, and the reaction again is basically a yawn.