In many ways Julian Edelman, MVP of this year’s thoroughly un-super Super Bowl, is the perfect example of what it means to be a New England Patriot. The versatile receiver doesn’t have the regular season statistics that wow most people, but he saves his best performances for the playoffs where he is second behind only Jerry Rice in postseason receptions. He’s a true overachiever who has gone on to become a local hero throughout New England. Also, in true Patriots fashion, he’s fallen foul of the NFL’s rulemakers, although he certainly hasn’t received the same amount of media scrutiny for his infraction as Tom Brady did during the Deflategate saga.
Before we get into that, let’s focus on the positives. In Sunday’s Super Bowl, Edelman picked up 141 receiving yards and eight first downs. Brady seemed to aim for him whenever a drive stuttered and he caught 10 of the 12 passes thrown his way. He was unquestionably the game’s MVP unless you want to count punter Ryan Allen, and nobody wants to do that. It was an incredible performance, especially coming from a player who missed last season with a torn ACL.
Except, he may have had some help coming back from that injury. Edelman was suspended for the first four games of this season after a violation of the NFL’s performance-enhancing drugs policy. While we don’t know specifically what he tested positive for – the exact results are not made public – Edelman didn’t protest the suspension. On Instagram, he pleaded ignorance saying, “I’m very sorry – I don’t know what happened. I’ve taken many, many tests obviously over the course of my career, and nothing like this has ever happened.”
In the aftermath of Edelman’s MVP, there has been some discussion about how appropriate it was for him to receive the award in light of the suspension, but it’s remarkable how the incident was seemingly forgotten, particularly since there were two weeks of nonstop coverage heading into the game.
In fact, Edelman’s story has echoes of other celebrated Super Bowl champions. It was presented as a heartwarming story when Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis ended his career with a Super Bowl victory in 2013, despite convincing reports that he too took performance-enhancing substances in order to return from a serious injury. Peyton Manning retired as one of the greatest players in the NFL, and remains an omnipresent figure in the media, his reputation untarnished by reports that he used HGH (it should be noted that, unlike Edelman, Lewis and Manning never failed tests for PEDs).
It may be just that in the NFL, the use of performance-enhancing drugs is not a huge deal. In an article for USA Today about Edelman’s PED suspension, Nancy Armour compares Edelman’s four-game punishment with those handed out by Major League Baseball, noting that MLB could have suspended a player who failed a drug test for the entirety of the postseason. She concludes that it’s different in the NFL: “we don’t even bat an eye at NFL players who dope. Rarely does a month go by without a player drawing a four-game suspension for PEDs, yet the announcement draws as much attention as the endless shuffles of the practice squad.”
She points out that it’s partly because we don’t see NFL players as human beings but as super-human gladiators. Deep down on some level, we assume that use of performance-enhancing drugs is rampant in the NFL and we accept it. The controversies that occur tend to be when NFL athletes reveal themselves to be all too human. Edelman’s former teammate Josh Gordon received far more negative attention for getting caught using recreational drugs than Edelman did for using a substance that (according to the NFL) could give him an edge in the actual games. Then, of course, there’s the saga of Colin Kaepernick, who has been essentially blackballed by the league for the “crime” of protesting police brutality. Who knows what he was thinking when he received the news of Edelman’s Super Bowl honors.
In any case, none of this should be on Edelman. He could only serve the punishment he was given – and returned to play admirably on the game’s biggest stage. He deserved the award and any attempts to retroactively take it away or put an asterisk next to it wouldn’t be right or fair. This, however, might be an opportunity for the league – and us – to stop and think about how we judge the actions of players.