BREAKING: Gronk Will Start Sunday, and Nobody Will Care How

Let’s just get this out of the way right now:

Rob Gronkowski is starting for the New England Patriots on Sunday.

There, you heard it here first. Be sure to cite your source correctly: BallHyped.net.

All this talk about the Patriots tight end being questionable, or “day to day” as he claimed during Tuesday’s Super Bowl XLVI Media Day festivities, is crazy.

There’s no way the Patriots’ biggest offensive threat is going to miss the biggest game of the season with a high ankle sprain.

Not in this day in age. A day when Terrell Owens needed less than two months to return from a severely sprained ankle and a fractured fibula to play in Super Bowl XXXIX.

That’s what God invented micro currents and hyperbaric chambers for, right?

Heck, if not for those injections of cortisone and xylocaine, Kirk Gibson’s walk-off home run in the 1988 World Series would have never happened.

Luckily for the sanctity of the game, the NFL has outlawed such shots and subscription performance enhancers, right?

Think again. NFL players have been taking 60 mg shots of Toradol like it’s going out of style for almost a decade now.

But at least HGH is out of the game, right?

It’s been six months since the lockout ended and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and NFL Players Association executive director DeMaurice Smith announced the NFL would become the first American pro sports league to test for Human Growth Hormone. But since that announcement on the steps of the Canton Hall of Fame, not one test has been administered. Not one.

And it’s not because there’s an issue with how the tests are done. After all, the World Anti-Doping Agency has been testing for HGH since 2004 with little or no issues.

So why is the biggest storyline of Super Bowl week about Gronkowski’s high left ankle sprain?

It’s clear Gronk is going to play Sunday, by any means possible.

We’re not saying he’s going to go the HGH route, but if he wanted to, he could get away with it – and chalk up his return to a cortisone shot before the game.

Nobody would ever know. Which begs the question, why isn’t the lack of HGH testing a storyline in this Super Bowl? You know, what was supposed to be the first, truly “clean” Super Bowl.

Instead, the storylines revolve around a rematch of the 2008 Super Bowl, which, we should mention, featured Patriots safety Rodney Harrison – who earlier that same season was suspended only four games for violating the NFL’s drug policy and admitting to taking HGH.

And then there was Super Bowl XXXVIII, which also featured the Patriots, when a handful of Carolina Panthers players were linked to HGH and other performance enhancers.

Yet, eight years later, the Super Bowl storylines have nothing to do with HGH.

If anything, this year’s Super Bowl continues to promote the use of performance enhancers and subscription drugs so that players can bounce back from injuries quicker and gain every competitive advantage.

But I’m sure Harrison will bring all that up with co-hosts Bob Costas and Dan Patrick during Sunday’s Super Bowl XLVI Pregame Show on NBC.