2. The offender, somehow, beat the system. Unlikely. Each time a player is tested, the testers are instructed to observe him urinating. I've only heard one player ever tell me he wasn't strictly observed while urinating for a test. Other players have told me they're offended by the process, because it's uncomfortable, obviously, to have a stranger stare at your groin while you're trying to urinate. The instructors, NFL PR man Greg Aiello told me, are told that the player must be naked "from nipples to knees.''

3. The system is corrupt. I can't tell you how many people I meet who tell me: "The NFL's dirty. It's got to be dirty. Look at how big those guys are," or something to that effect. At the league meetings in Hawaii last month, I met a doctor at the hotel who, after pleasantries were exchanged, said, "Why don't you ever write about all the steroids in the game?'' I started to explain about the testing, and he said, "Come on. They catch who they want to catch.'' I get that kind of cynicism all the time. And this Panther story just feeds into it. Three guys, maybe more, possibly implicated in a monstrous steroid problem, and they don't get caught. How long were they doing it?

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4. The offender never took the Stanozolol. You're right. I think this is ridiculous, too.

Until I get more evidence to the contrary, I'm going to believe reason No. 1 is the answer for now. Which is why I bring up my Band-Aid of a solution: Test more. "Do you want to test every player every day?'' Birch asked. No. But I want testing to be tripled. Random-test 20 players per team per week during the season, and test five or six days a week, not one. If a guy knows he's going to be tested once or twice a month (or more), he'd have to have a death wish to use anything.

Now, the more you read about 'roids, the more you know what you don't know. For instance, one of the accusations in the CBS story was that the Carolina players had received testosterone cream, the kind that is used topically. There's no definitive word on how long this cream stays in your system; Birch wouldn't hazard a guess whether a test done a week after this cream was used would yield a positive result. If this cream can't be recognized by a steroid test five or six days after use, what's to stop a player from using it Monday afternoon? But if you test on different days -- and more often -- a player's not going to know if it's safe for him to use the cream. What if he gets summoned to test the next day?

One more problem with the system. Most men's bodies produce testosterone and a hormone, epitestosterone, in about equal amounts. The NFL has followed the Olympic standard regarding raised levels of testosterone; if an athlete has testosterone levels six times the level of epitestosterone, it's viewed as a positive test for an excess of the former. Last January, the World Anti-Doping Agency reduced the ratio for a violation to 4:1, and the NFL is attempting to follow suit. The NFLPA likely will agree to the change, but hasn't yet.

I posed this question to Birch: If a player had a doctor who could tell him how much testosterone cream, for example, he could use while still staying within the legal ratio, why wouldn't he do that? Especially if he knew he'd never flunk a steroid test but still get a good kick from the extra testosterone.

"There would always be an inherent risk,'' Birch said. "You'd have to find an unscrupulous lab to measure your testosterone. But if someone calibrates how much to take, and succeeds, then no program would catch that violation.''

Seems like a pretty large hole to me. "We're testing to the limit that science allows us,'' Birch said. "I think our net is very effective, and when we find that there's a hole in our net that allows a fish to get through, we repair the hole ... We're doing a great job of finding, detecting and deterring steroid use. The vast majority of the people who would attempt to cheat, we'll catch.''