This morning’s Congressional hearing in the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform was titled, “HGH Testing In The NFL: Is the Science Ready?” And by the time committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) and ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-MD) finished their opening statements, it seemed they had already answered their own question. Both thought the science was ready. Each panel participant seemed to already hold the same view, and the few members of the committee who bothered to show up and ask questions felt similarly.

Which leads to the question that never truly got answered: Why are we here?

The two-hour hearing bounced between what seemed like attempts by members of Congress to shame the NFL Players Association, which agreed to testing for human growth hormone (HGH) in 2011 but has been reticent to finalize that deal since, into getting its act together and attempts to draw a link between the lack of testing at the professional level and the use of HGH and other performance enhancing drugs in amateur sports.

Which leads to other questions that never truly got answered: Does such a link exist? And, more importantly, does drug testing prevent drug use?

One panel guest, Dr. Linn Goldberg from Oregon Health Sciences University, was skeptical. Goldberg helped design a drug test for high school athletes, but “[a]fter two years” of testing, “no drug or alcohol deterrent effects were present for past month use at any of the four follow-up periods,” according to his prepared testimony. “In addition, athletes at testing schools, had an increase in risk factors for future substance use.” Goldberg cited another study in which researchers found that “drug testing of athletes was not associated with lower illicit drug use among male high school athletes.” Drug use in professional sports also hasn’t dissipated. Positive tests are up since testing began in both the NFL and Major League Baseball, Goldberg said.

Which leads to another obvious question no one in the hearing asked: if high school athletes who are subject to drug tests don’t stop using performance enhancing drugs, and pro athletes who are subject to drug tests don’t stop using performance enhancing drugs, why would drug testing professional athletes make high school athletes stop using performance enhancing drugs?

Goldberg helped design programs known as ATLAS and ATHENA, education programs aimed at reducing drug use among high school athletes. After ATLAS, according to his testimony, athletes reported a 50 percent decline in steroid use. ATHENA, meanwhile, resulted in lower usage rates of steroids and dietary pills. Those programs would seem to go farther in reducing drug use among amateur athletes than simply testing the NFL, and in 2004, Congress authorized ATLAS and ATHENA for federal funding. The money, totaling $15 million a year for six years, was never appropriated. Goldberg made sure to note that fact near the end of his testimony, only to be reminded by Issa that the committee was there to talk about the NFL issue.

And yet, all of the NFL talk was relatively pointless, since there was no one on the panel from the league or the union. Afterward, Adolpho Birch, the league’s senior vice president for law and labor policy, reminded the media that the NFL remains committed to HGH testing. And while the NFLPA has indeed held up testing over scientific concerns, its players ultimately want the tests to occur, as evidenced by quotes from players like London Fletcher and Anthony Gonzalez that were read aloud at the hearing. The NFLPA’s George Atallah, who also spoke to the media, said many of the union’s concerns were about the process and how players who test positive will be handled, not about testing itself.

“We want to be good role models not only for the players who play football but for youth sports throughout the country,” Atallah said. “But along with testing and having a clean game, we also want to set the example of what fair due process is like, for what the actual effectiveness of a program is like, and those are the things we want to set forth as well and things that our players care about.”

So sure, it shouldn’t take two years for the NFL and NFLPA to solve the testing issue. But that’s a dispute over minutiae that is hardly worthy of a Congressional hearing. HGH testing would undoubtedly make the NFL a safer, fairer, more legitimate game. One of the aims of the hearing, though, was to make it clear that NFL testing could make youth sports safer. After two hours of talking, whether that would actually be the case remains clear as mud.

According to NFL Hall of Famer Dick Butkus, who was on the panel and now runs an organization aimed at preventing use of performance enhancing drugs in youth sports, there are 400,000 teens who have experimented with those drugs. Finding out how those drugs are used, how they should be tested, and how their use should be prevented would have made for an interesting and useful hearing. By making that a secondary topic and ignoring basic questions about prevention that could have and should have been asked and answered, Congress instead did what it too often does best: wasted a little of everyone’s time.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s (R) attempt to push a union-busting “right-to-work” law through the state legislature this week was met with considerable opposition from labor groups, who have protested en masse both outside and inside the state capitol in Lansing since Snyder announced his support for the law on Thursday.

Today, the legislation has a new foe: the National Football League Players Association, which represents players on Michigan’s NFL franchise, the Detroit Lions, and has come out against “right-to-work” before.

“We stood up against this in the past, and we stand against it in its current form in Michigan,” George Atallah, the association’s assistant executive director for external affairs, told ThinkProgress in a phone interview. “Our leadership and players are always proud to stand with workers in Michigan and everywhere else. We don’t think voters chose this, and we don’t think workers deserve this.”

The NFLPA is no stranger to labor disputes. NFL owners locked out players before the start of the 2011 season, and the players association was vocal in its support of the NFL Referees Association when the league locked out its officials at the beginning of this season.

Last year, the NFLPA opposed Indiana’s push for “right-to-work” just weeks before Indianapolis hosted Super Bowl XLVI. “We share all the same issues that the American people share,” NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith told The Nation at the time. “We want decent wages. We want a fair pension. We want to be taken care of when we get hurt. We want a decent and safe working environment. So when you look at proposed legislation in a place like Indiana that wants to call it something like ‘Right to Work,’ I mean, let’s just put the hammer on the nail. It’s untrue.”

Players, including Chicago Bears quarterback and Indiana native Jay Cutler, also spoke out against the Indiana law. While in Indianapolis, Smith marched with the UNITE-HERE union when its hotel workers were protesting low wages, missed overtime pay, and the firing of contract workers at local Hyatt hotels.

With such a short time table between introduction of the Michigan legislation and expected passage, Atallah said the players association had no plans for public actions against the right-to-work proceedings, but he iterated that the union stands with workers in Michigan. “We disagree with it and we’ll continue to stand with Michigan’s workers,” Atallah said.

Immediately after the suicide of Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher, who police say murdered his girlfriend at their home before driving to the Chiefs’ practice facility and shooting himself in front of the team’s coach and general manager, thoughts turned to the role concussions and brain injuries may have played in the tragedy.

But during halftime of last night’s Sunday Night Football broadcast, NBC’s Bob Costas brought up another angle: the role guns, and our nation’s lax gun laws, played in the tragedy. After a brief introduction, Costas quoted Kansas City-based columnist Jason Whitlock, who wrote yesterday that he believed both Belcher and his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, would be alive today were it not for Belcher’s possession of a gun:

‘Our current gun culture,’ Whitlock wrote, ‘ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy. And more convenience store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead. Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it. In the coming days, Jovan Belcher’s actions and their possible connection to football will be analyzed. Who knows? But here,’ wrote Jason Whitlock, ‘is what I believe — if Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.’

Conservatives and gun advocates are, of course, angry at Costas’ insinuation, via Whitlock, that gun control could have prevented the murder of Kasandra Perkins. Fox & Friends blasted Costas this morning, with co-host Brian Kilmeade relying on the tried-and-true point that follows every outbreak of gun violence this country has. “I just don’t know if it’s appropriate enough on a Sunday night, less than 24 hours after this guy took his own life and killed his girlfriend and the mother of his baby, to make that stance,” Kilmeade said. “I don’t think we needed to hear that last night.”

When, then, is the appropriate time to talk about gun violence? According to gun advocates, it wasn’t after another black teenager was shot in a parking lot because he was listening to loud music. It wasn’t after another mass murder at one of our schools, shopping malls, or movie theaters. It wasn’t in a year when another 30,000 Americans lost their lives to firearms (11,000 in homicides), or in a country where 1,800 women like Kasandra Perkins are killed in gun disputes and another 5,000 are treated for assault-related gunshot wounds every year. It wasn’t during presidential debates. It wasn’t after Trayvon Martin was killed for wearing a hoodie, after Jared Lee Loughner shot a member of Congress in the head, after the Dark Knight Rises theater shooting, or after the latest murderous weekend in one of our nation’s biggest cities. So if those weren’t the right times, and this isn’t either, when? Which high-profile murder, suicide, or mass killing will be the one that gets us to talk?

Perhaps, if Jovan Belcher didn’t own a gun, he would have found another way to kill Kasandra Perkins and himself. Or perhaps he wouldn’t have. Having a gun in the home, after all, increases both the risk of homicide and suicide, and 60 percent of our nation’s homicides are committed with guns. Studies have shown that guns in the home increase chances of homicide two to three times, and gun death rates are seven times higher in states that have high household gun ownership (Missouri is 21st, and considered a high-ownership state), according to the Brady Campaign. For suicide, guns present a similar problem. “Every study that has examined the issue to date has found that within the U.S., access to firearms is associated with increased suicide risk,” according to Harvard’s School of Public Health, and suicides committed with guns are most likely to be successful.

A domestic dispute in any home may leave a woman bloody and bruised, but in a home without a gun, it’s far less likely to leave her murdered. The presence of a firearm in the home increases the risk of homicide for women by five times, according to one study, and two-thirds of women killed with guns each year die in domestic disputes. When a domestic dispute involves a firearm, it is 12 times more likely to end in homicide. If Jovan Belcher didn’t have a gun, perhaps his mother, who watched her son shoot the mother of his three-month-old daughter, could have helped calmed the fight. If Jovan Belcher didn’t have a gun, perhaps the coaches and executives who watched him put the final bullet through his own head, or the police officers who arrived seconds too late, could have saved his life.

We’ll never know if the lack of a legally-owned gun would have changed the situation and kept both Kasandra Perkins and Jovan Belcher alive. Whitlock believes it would have, and I do too. What we do know is that Saturday morning, a gun made it easier for a man to kill his girlfriend, to take his own life, to leave his three-month-old daughter without her parents. And the Jovan Belcher story happens somewhere in this country every day. Somewhere, today, a man will shoot his girlfriend. A woman will shoot herself. A teenage boy will die at the hand of a firearm. A dispute that could have ended with a punch will instead end with a bullet. If that isn’t enough to make us talk about the role of guns in our society, I don’t know what is.

From the pros to college to high school, football players across the country have donned pink uniform accessories (and sometimes even pink uniforms) to honor Breast Cancer Awareness Month. In the National Football League, players are required to wear pink accessories for the first week of October, and the gloves, towels, and wristbands are optional for the remainder of the month. Most of the gear is then auctioned off to raise money for breast cancer programs.

But in Corbin, Kentucky, a high school football player who wore pink gloves and a pink towel during one game says he was disciplined by his coach and school for doing so:

A Corbin High School football player is upset because he was disciplined for wearing pink gloves on the field and using a pink towel during a recent game.

School officials say pink gloves go against their uniform policy.

“My best friend’s mother died. She had cancer,” said sophomore Austin O’Neill, the starting cornerback for the Corbin Redhounds.

O’Neill didn’t wear pink because he wanted to look cool or show off. He wore it because he wanted to highlight the terrible effect breast cancer had on the life of his best friend’s mother. And because he wore the gloves (and because the school punished him for it), his personal story is getting out in a way it otherwise wouldn’t have. The NFL can learn from that. There are countless stories like O’Neill’s in the NFL too, like that of Larry Fitzgerald, the Arizona Cardinals’ wide receiver who lost his mother to breast cancer and started a foundation to fight it.

But the average fan tuning in on Sunday afternoons won’t hear stories like Fitzgerald or O’Neill’s. Fields are flooded with pink gear, pink ribbons, and even pink penalty flags. But all of that serves as one big dose of ambiguity, since for the average fan, the meaning of “awareness” is unclear. So too, is how much money the campaign generates for awareness, prevention, and research. I watch football every Sunday, but until I dug around the NFL’s pink web site and found quotes from NFL officials in other news stories, I had no idea what specifically the NFL’s campaign was meant to achieve or how it was doing it. To be honest, I’m still not quite sure.

The pink campaigns also seem to paper over what exactly we need to be aware of. The disease itself, after all, is well known. What we need to be aware of is the fact that mammograms are hard to get for uninsured women, that cheap providers like Planned Parenthood are being shut down, that for all the “awareness” we see, there still isn’t a cure and there is still a long way to go in the fight to find one. Seeing pink gloves and pink towels on a football field isn’t enough to make any of that clear.

The NFL deserves credit for highlighting and fighting the disease. But it could afford some clarity in its mission to help the American Cancer Society provide breast cancer screenings in underserved areas (again, a fact that isn’t clear to the average viewer) and its overall fight against the disease. It could afford even more clarity in how much money it donates to research and prevention, and why it doesn’t donate more. The league runs advertisements throughout the year highlighting its charity work with United Way, but while it has public service announcements from players like Fitzgerald on its web site, similar ads about what its breast cancer campaign is doing don’t seem to exist.

Breast cancer “awareness” is important, but it’s also ambiguous. By using players who have been personally affected, who are wearing pink because it means something personal and not just because it’s cool or required, to clarify and publicize its mission, the NFL could go a long way in making the campaign more effective — and more aware — than it already is.

There are conflicting reports about whether a deal to end the National Football League’s lockout of its professional referees is in place. ESPN reported that a deal was “at hand” an hour after reporting that the two sides weren’t close, while NFL.com has reported that the officials union and league have reached minor agreements but are still stuck on the biggest point of contention: the referees’ pension benefits.

Regardless, I wanted to address one thing that keeps coming up when the lockout is discussed: whether the NFL players, who are also unionized, could end the lockout by showing solidarity through a walkout or other means. The short answer to that will disappoint many of you, because it is almost undoubtedly, “No.”

The NFL Players Association stood with the officials from the start, promising to consider all options and refusing to take a strike or walkout off the table. After the egregious mistake at the end of the Monday Night Football game this week, Green Bay Packers offensive lineman TJ Lang said players debated walking off the field or taking a knee on every play this week to show how disgruntled they are with the replacement officials.

The reality is, though, even in the absence of a deal, none of that is likely to happen. The “take a knee on every play” strategy would certainly cause a public relations nightmare for the league, but it would be nearly impossible to organize league-wide. Plus, with paying fans in the seats and at home, there’s a better-than-solid chance that it would backfire, making the players villains when they are currently on the right side of this debacle.

The other option, a general walkout by the entire NFLPA, is even less likely. The collective bargaining agreement players and owners reached last year contains a no strike clause that prevents players from walking off the job unless they feel their jobs or their union is at stake. Walking out, then, would require making the legal argument that use of scab officials is negligent and creates an overly hazardous work environment, which would allow the players to void the entire CBA. That would almost certainly lead to protracted and costly legal battle that I suspect the union doesn’t want. And while it would certainly show solidarity, it too would turn at least some fans against the players and officials at a time when the NFLRA has all the leverage in this fight.

Outside the players, others are taking action too. The president of the New Jersey state senate introduced legislation yesterday that would ban professional sporting events played in the state from using replacement labor, a noble cause but one that isn’t likely to go anywhere (the NFL quickly dismissed it as a stunt).

It’s good that people are taking notice (even if it’s often for the wrong reasons), and it’s good that players like Lang are discussing ways to throw their muscle around to help the officials. But the players have long argued that there isn’t much they can do — that this is a mess created by the league and, as such, will have to be solved by the league — and I tend to agree with them. It would be great, as someone who is sympathetic to the NFLRA’s cause, to see the players walk off the field in solidarity Thursday in Baltimore and Sunday across the country. The reality, though, is that there just isn’t much the players can do.

By now, there’s no need to rehash the blown call that ended week three of the National Football League season and left everyone — fans, players, coaches, politicians, and media types — fuming at the replacement officials brought in thanks to the owners lockout of the league’s professional referees. Everyone has seen it, the league has denied the Green Bay Packers’ appeal to overturn the call, and what’s done is done — except the lockout, which everyone is starting to realize is jeopardizing the quality of the game.

The call was bad. It cost the Packers a much-needed win, and the outcome may play a big role in determining whether Seattle or Green Bay goes to the playoffs later this winter. But here’s the thing: it was nowhere near the biggest, most dangerous blunder the refs have made this season.

Golden Tate, the Seattle wide receiver who caught the game-winning touchdown pass without actually catching the game-winning touchdown pass (after blatantly interfering with a Green Bay defender, no less), was the perpetrator of an illegal block that knocked Dallas Cowboys linebacker Sean Lee out of the team’s previous game. The hit, clearly against NFL rules, didn’t draw a flag. And this week, there were more like it: Oakland Raiders wide receiver Darius Heyward-Bey left on a stretcher after taking a helmet-to-helmet hit that didn’t earn Pittsburgh Steelers safety Ryan Mundy a penalty.

Those are the hits that concerned NFL players when the season began without a settlement between the league and the NFL Referees Association. Those are the hits that led DeMaurice Smith, the NFLPA’s executive director, to tell me that the labor dispute “flies in the face” of the NFL’s efforts to make the game safer for players. Those are the hits that a competent officiating crew could prevent, or at least penalize, by keeping control of the game and policing it the way it is meant to be policed. And those are the hits that haven’t drawn the outrage drawn by last night’s call.

It’s a shame that the Packers lost a game because of a blown call. But it would have been a bigger shame had Heyward-Bey’s career ended because of the cavalier nature in which the scab officials, and the league itself, has treated head-crunching hits since the season began. And it’s an even bigger shame that those hits aren’t becoming a bigger concern with fans and the media.

It’s hard to know definitively that the exact hits wouldn’t take place with the real referees on the field. Some undoubtedly would. What is inarguable is that the replacement refs, through their own incompetence, have lost the respect of the players, and as a result, they have lost control of the games. Players are pre-ordained to push the limits of the acceptable, and by not flagging them for blatantly illegal and incredibly dangerous hits, the replacements are enabling them. That makes the field a more dangerous place for everyone involved.

Let’s face it: the NFL doesn’t care about player safety, and neither do fans. Hits like those on Darius Heyward-Bey and Sean Lee are what keep football fans coming back for more, and only blown calls that directly affect the outcomes of nationally-televised games are enough to turn the replacement refs from a laughingstock into a point of outrage. And because fans don’t care, because the media doesn’t care, the league will never care enough, at least until someone like Heyward-Bey is leaving the field on a stretcher without his thumb in the air.

The NFL and its replacement referees deserve all the scorn they are getting for demeaning the product and making a mockery of the sport. But the real scorn should come from the fact that the league replaced unionized workers with scabs and is jeopardizing the safety of its players to save pennies on the dollar. This is America, though, where we apparently don’t care about our fellow workers or the modern day gladiators who are ruining their lives one hit at a time, as long as the right team wins the football game.