(He told you he was innocent, but you couldn’t see past his enormous head.)

Under the reign of the now deposed and disgraced former California State Athletic Commission Executive Director Armando Garcia, the state’s drug-testing and appeals process ranged from suspect to entirely screwed up and disorganized.  But the new sheriff in town, Bill Douglas, plans to put an end to those days of comical incompetence.  He started things off with last weekend’s Strikeforce: Destruction event.  By conducting absolutely no testing at all.  

Oh, I get it.  Because that will really throw steroid-users off, right? They’ll think they got away with it, but the guilt will eventually overpower them, forcing them to confess their transgressions to the commission and thus circumventing the need for the costly testing process altogether.  Genius!  Except it turns out that’s not really the plan at all, and it’s more of a brief moratorium while they get their act together:

"I’ve cancelled all drug testing across the board while I revamp the entire process from start to finish," Mr. Douglas wrote in an email. "I expect the new and improved program to roll out next week."

So Lina Kvokov gets away with showing up to fight Kim Couture while obviously high on mushrooms, all because the CSAC finally realized what a mess their system is?  Oh, that’s going to burn Sean Sherk’s ass something fierce.

But the good news is that things seem to be turning around in the Golden State now that Garcia is gone.  Perhaps Douglas realized that if states like Florida and Nevada can get their drug-testing done without it turning into a circus, there’s no reason they can’t pull it off as well.  

Antonio Silva is still trumpeting his innocence and blaming GNC for a false positive, and we all remember Sherk’s appeal that was first postponed, then not really heard, before the commission finally decided to uphold his fine but cut his suspension in half, effectively declaring that he was only kind of guilty of taking steroids.

The bad news for Douglas is that he takes over a commission with a legacy of fuck-ups such as that one, but the good news is that it won’t take much to do a better job than his predecessor.  Just don’t date any co-workers, and the rest is all gravy.