The recent suspension of Seattle Seahawks defensive end Bruce Irvin did not escape the notice of Jim Harbaugh. The San Francisco 49ers coach has kept an eye on the trend of Seahawks players being suspended for performance-enhancing drug use.
"I've definitely noticed it," Harbaugh said in comments distributed by the 49ers. "You don't know what it is. Even when people say what it is, you don't know that that's what it is. For this, throw it out, or it's that. But that's usually the agents of the players themselves saying it's, for example, Adderall.
"But the NFL doesn't release what it actually is. So you have no idea. You're taking somebody at their word, that I don't know that you can take them at their word, understanding the circumstances."
Harbaugh said what a lot of us think when we hear a player cry "Adderall" after a positive test for a PED. It's hard to simply accept the word of a player after he just failed a test. And Harbaugh just happened to point out this trend when he was talking about his rival team's biggest offseason issue.
Reached later Tuesday on the issue, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll avoided making the story any bigger.
"We've kind of dealt with this to set into motion a really clear mindset to take care of business and treat this situation that is around the league very seriously," Carroll said, via The Associated Press. "I don't know about commenting about anybody else's team, but as far as we're concerned, we feel like we've addressed it directly."
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Harbaugh said he addressed the issue with his players before it became a problem.
"Play by the rules," Harbaugh said he told his players. "And you always want to be above reproach. Especially when you're good, because you don't want people to come back and say they're winning because they're cheating. ... So we want to be above reproach in everything and do everything by the rules. Because if you cheat to win, then you've already lost, according to Bo Schembechler. And Bo Schembechler is about next to the word of God as you can get in my mind. It's not the word of God, but it's close."
It's nice to see Jim Harbaugh still bringing his strong press conference game in the middle of June. And it's nice to see two division rivals that aren't above publicly tweaking each other when it's warranted.
Follow Gregg Rosenthal on Twitter @greggrosenthal.
