Lately we got a dose of steroids and the problems facing baseball. The talking heads at MLB wouldn’t do anything about the problem until Congress got involved.

Now they call it Spygate. The illegal taping of NFL practices and walk throughs.

From that moment in late September until Friday, the NFL never answered the questions of exactly what the Patriots did and why the evidence was destroyed. What did the NFL do? They fined the team and destroyed the tapes and said, “no comment” for the last 4 months. People put these questions to NFL spokesman Greg Aiello and to Goodell, but were told the league would not reveal what was in the destroyed evidence. In December, The New York Times pressed the NFL to say what was in the destroyed materials, and again, the league refused. At his annual state of the league address Friday, Goodell made his first public comments about the destroyed evidence.

So, if you are a New England supporter, or simply a sports fan, wondering, “Why is all this coming out right before the Super Bowl?” the answer is, “Because the NFL would not answer the questions until Goodell was in front of the media this week.” Some of this information might have emerged weeks or months ago, had the NFL not acted as if there were something to hide on the tapes.

Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania — the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has some jurisdiction over the NFL’s precious antitrust exemption — wants to hold hearings on why the material collected in the NFL’s investigation was destroyed.

Think Congress has no business investigating sports? Most NFL teams play in publicly subsidized stadiums, and NFL games are aired over public airwaves controlled by federal licenses. The licenses, among other things, prohibit any pre-arrangement or artifice in what is presented as live competition. If a Super Bowl were affected by cheating, that would be a legitimate matter of concern to Congress. Plus, the recent lesson learned via baseball and steroids was that Major League Baseball did not clean up its own house until Congress put some pressure on.

So the answer is a resounding YES, Congress should and needs to help get this mess straightened out.