The League ( and that’s not a typo, the NFL really has become “The League;” capital T, capital L) said today that Verizon will be carrying part of its NFL Network feed its 68 million or so subscribers — or an audience about 90 precent of the entire cable universe. Not bad.

The four year deal is valued at $720 million, or a little over $10 a sub, or about $2.5 a year per sub. Keep in mind that cable companies pay $3.50 a sub for ESPN’s content.

Verizon will be pumping a full slate of NFL Network stuff through its cell system. Including coverage of the draft, the Sunday Night game, the RedZone and lots more. And I think it is definitely worth a test drive: I have been impressed with Sprint’s riff on NFL content.

Basically, this is a good deal for everybody. Verizon is smart to lock down a long term deal with the NFL now. Since the price of sports content will  only skyrocket. The NCAA’s  Basketball deal is coming due soon, which will almost certainly set a new record. Comcast now has NBC and is big into regional sports networks. So they are a new player. And don’t forget the   new slate of digital content operations looking for content. Apple will need something compelling to sell on iPads. As does Google. They even violated its “never pay for anything” rule by carrying cricket on YouTube.

The NFL in turn gets to broaden its mobile reach while still getting paid. Imagine what poor AT&T and TMobile will wind up paying with a few years of traffic data under its belt.

Really makes the whole ABC/Cablevision spat look like small potatoes.

Well, that might just be the case.

I’ve been digging around in the dusty ole performance enhancing drug world trying to get a handle on this human growth hormone nonsense. As I’ve been moaning about for some time, there really isn’t much “there” there when it comes to information about HGH.

And I came across a 2009 study. Done by Falk Eippert at The University Medical Center in Hamburg, the research used sophisticated imaging technology to show that pain was actively reduced by nothing more than a placebo. The test imaged the cerebral centers of subjects with mild burns who were given a fake pain reducing ointment. The sham goop worked just as well as something called naloxone, which actively blocked nerve receptors. This study was widely quoted at the time: it was clear the power of mere suggestion can help those with active burns help themselves.

With this kind of evidence, how big a stretch is it that high power athletes can recover faster, grow larger and hit further simply because they believe they can. And how interesting would it be to de-cloak the shady world of performance enhancing drugs to actually study this question. We really still don’t know if drugs really do enhance performance, or just give us the will to think they do.

As the great Zen Master Yogi Berra said, “Ninety percent of this game is half mental.”

With college basketball not really compelling yet, and not much else on, I gotta say, for shear sports tech love these days it’s tough to beat drag boats.  This weekend, The Speed Channel ran the finals of the Lucas Oil Drag Boat Racing series. There was some decent coverage of the so-called Top Fuel Hydro drag boats, which raced earlier this year at the Firebird Raceway in Chandler, Arizona,

No doubt, these are some serious pieces of hardware: Top Fuel Hydros are 19 feet long, 93 inches wide, and weigh about 3,200 lbs. with driver and fuel. Props turn at a simply insane 28,000 rpm. 3,000 is really fast for most normal power boats. And features a legit General Dynamics F-16 cockpit windshield to stand the strain, water spray and pure speed.

These suckers can get up near 260 MPH. On the water. Wooh!

The cool part is these boats are un-restricted racers, with no wind tunnel testing or advanced R&D budgets. So basically if a racer wants to put a 6,000 HP engine in one of these bad boys, and see what happens they can. Never mind that Top Fuels regularly get airborne, flip over, catch on fire or otherwise fall apart. You wanna go fast. You go fast. What happens is up to you.

And that is what racing, and sports really, is  all about. Got to LOVE that.

A company called ProTeX announced today that it is shipping a full line of custom right or left handed batting gloves that offer unheard of levels of protection to batter’s hands and wrists. Though the company’s products appear to be just padded versions of the classic batting glove, some pretty darn slick technology is built in. Called Advanced Impact Composites, the yellow areas on the left are a mix of rigid polymers and flexible pads which absorb the impact of the ball, similar to say, how motorcycle jackets and logging pants work.

Now, clearly many at-bats remain to see if these gloves can protect batters. But if the ProTex gloves can help a major league hitter even a little bit, batters will fear pitches less, crowd the plate bit more, and be more aggressive at the plate.

And at just $80, not only the major leagues, but the little leagues are going to find out how effective the ProTeX is.

Never mind the testing procedures for everything from steroids to human growth hormone to even amphetamines is at best a hit or miss affair. Or the policies to administer and regulate these drugs in organized athletics make little sense. Or that media coverage drifts between the hysterical and the clueless. The spiraling buzz, for example, around supposed HCH doc Anthony Galea has reached the ridiculous.

But now nonsense over HGH is spilling out into the larger world.

Case in point, a fella named Edwin. Maybe it’s his picture on the left or maybe not. Anyway, a guy who signs his name as Edwin has the, tip top number one Website across all major search engines for the term “HGH.” His site, HGHFacts, outranks similar fluff sites like HGH9, HGH.com, Eternal HGH and about a dozen other dubious sources of information about human growth hormone. About the only thing close to factual information is the Wikipedia entry on the subject, which I have to say is particularly thin. And even the Mayo Clinic’s page on HGH has little real data.

Bottom line: information and HGH don’t mix.

If sports is really trying to get itself clean around HGH, how about we start with some real numbers. What does HGH really do?  What are the dosage limits? What are the hard cases of abuse? And maybe even the success stories. It seems we are pretending HGH does not exist. And that only creates a vacuum for dopes like Edwin to step in and define the conversation.

No wonder Jose Reyes and Carlos Beltran and Alex Rodriguez get sucked in. They’re just overpaid kids. If these are the facts we are giving them, heaven help all of us.

Like the United States Hockey Team running out of gas in overtime, March Madness On Demand this year is shaping up like last year’s March Madness On Demand. CBSSports released details about about what we can expect for its online media player for this year’s NCAA Men’s Div. 1 Tournament. And it all had a Ground Hog Day sort of feel. Just one big doover:  All the games will be available in HD and standard def. There will specialized video content and lots ‘o stats.

About the only real upgrade will be the “Boss” button which will be “new and improved.” Of course, from a tech perspective, a Boss button is the dumbest thing ever; this is a computer network. Your boss is perfectly capable of  seeing exactly where and what you do on a work computer. But CBSSports is giving fans the illusion of privacy … which is all you can expect these days, right?

There are some sports tech questions that even I have no answer for.  And as we gear up for Canada v. the United States in the Olympic hockey gold medal game, the question is: What elements are Don Cherry’s tie’s made of?

For those new to Canadian hockey, Cherry is the Chris Collinsworth of the sport: Bringing color,  analysis, insight and did we say, color to Canada’s national pastime. But considering the colors Cherry actually generates with his dudes, its fair to ask if] Cherry has a lead lined underwear. From here, I  figure his outfits are blend of plutonium and iridium. With just a touch of hidium … That’s the ugliest element in the periodic table.

Long live Don.

Can we please stop dissing Olympic skater’s costumes?

I am not sure where this one got going; but right around week two of the five ring sports fest, our media elite loves to tear into what skaters wear as they skate. Sure, what Johnny Weir, Evan Lysecheck, and Rachael Flatt wore in their respective programs can be sort of  goofy.  But these athletes are not stupid.  Costumes are a critical part of the skater’s trade. They must support programs, butts and fragile egos.

To pull all this off, it turns out skating costume are fairly complex, technologically sophisticated garments.

First of all, the prospective skate clothing designer has to engineer an outfit that stretches. That requires the use of a patterns that expand. Which  is way far from easy. Just check out what Specialty Sportswear has in terms of patterns that give. And this is for a basic skating costume. Imagine how sophisticated the design needs to be for an Olympic level skater.

Next, these patterns have to be executed from of a blizzard of advanced synthetic fibers, beads and other techno chatchkas.. Here are metallic blended fabrics that give a halographic three dimensionality to skating clothes. And here is a custom bead and ink maker from Canada. This is pretty complex stuff.

And like any sports ecosystem, there are plenty of  gadgets:

• Here is the IceLight boot warmer that fits over skate boots to keep feet warm.
• You can get protective pants from the Inside Edge.
• Skate boot tape to keep your skates looking slick from Sk8tape.
• Here is the Sport Mate skate sharpening tool, which looks pretty neat.
• Yet more protective pads from Skating Safe and Tommy Pad.

Let’s be honest here? Is any of this really that much dumber than a speed skating suit? Or what the bobsled teams wear? Or the half pipe boarders?

No, not really.