If you had Doug Barron in your office pool as the first player to get busted under the PGA Tour’s drug policy, congratulations. Make sure you buy yourself something nice.

OK, so they’re not telling us what the banned substance is, but looking at Barron’s lack of a six-pack, we’re guessing it wasn’t steroids.

Just a hunch, but something tells me not a lot of people predicted Barron would be the first one caught. The real question is did he really get caught doing anything illegal or, in other words, was this so-called banned substance really a textbook banned substance at all?

Barron has a lot of health issues. Odds are the drug in question was one of those cold medications that, for whatever reason, is on the banned list, or some other treatment prescribed by a doctor.

Gawking at that physique, anything Barron took was not about to enhance his performance.

Doug Barron, a cheater? Come on. On the PGA and Nationwide Tours combined, the guy made a grand total of – wait for it – ZERO dollars in 2009. But now, Barron is banned for a year and will have to find another line of work to make, um, that kind of money.

We may not know what the banned substance is, but putting on our Sherlock caps, it’s probably easy to pinpoint when, exactly, Barron put the wrong sample in the jar. Seeing how he has played one event since June, the betting here is he was busted at the Nationwide Tour’s Mexico Open last month. Gee, who knew Corona was on the PGA Tour’s banned substance list?

And now, with its first “cheater” marched out for the golf world to see, the PGA Tour can trumpet the success of its drug policy. Seeing how this bust will define Barron’s career more than anything he ever does on a golf course, what does that tell you about the significance of this particular urine test, if not the drug policy altogether?

Doug Barron ended up being a guinea pig. Nothing more.

Pat Perez probably summed it up best:

“It’s not like it’s a top-20 player who was trying to take steroids to catch Tiger,” Perez said. “In a way, it matters. And in a way, it doesn’t. He’s not really on the PGA Tour.”

Strong words from a guy with one career PGA Tour win, but Perez has a point nonetheless. Does anyone really care? If this was Phil or Camilo or Ernie, perhaps, but does the sacrificing of Doug Barron, who most of probably never heard of, send any shock waves through the golf world?

Of course not. In fact, the washout of the Viking Classic is more newsworthy.

But the PGA Tour needed their scapegoat to prove their drug policy does indeed work. Truth is, the bust doesn’t really prove anything.

Except, of course, that the PGA Tour got their man.