In an admission that is almost as stunning as the absence of any meaningful mainstream media reaction to it, Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw admitted last week that he took steroids while playing pro football in the 1970s.

“We did steroids to get away the aches and the speed of healing,” Bradshaw said on The Dan Patrick Show.  “My use of steroids from a doctor was to speed up injury, and [I] thought nothing of it. . . .  It was to speed up the healing process, that was it.  It wasn’t to get bigger and stronger and faster.”

But the problem is that plenty of players use and have used and will use steroids for the exact same reason.  When Pats safety Rodney Harrison was popped last year for possession of HGH, he claimed he wasn’t cheating because he was only doing it to recover from an injury — ignoring the obvious reality that using banned substances to speed recovery from an injury is simply another form of cheating.

Bradshaw says that he took steroids with a doctor’s prescription.  It’s irrelevant, in our view.  Steroids are now widely viewed as proof of cheating, both in the days before and after they were officially banned by the NFL.  Today, no player can use them, with or without a piece of paper with a squiggly line intended to reflect an approximation of a physician’s signature.

And Bradshaw’s use of the pronoun “we” reflects a recognition that he was hardly the only one using them.  Meanwhile, Bradshaw has continued to earn a very nice living as a member of the mainstream media while previously not once offering up any frank and candid admission of his own use of the substances, or regarding his knowledge of the extent to which others were using it.

It’s unclear why Bradshaw opted for candor with Patrick.  Maybe Dan is simply a damn good interviewer, who was able to get Bradshaw to talk about something he’d previously concealed.  Either way, this is a big story, and it deserves a lot more play than it has received.