Who Was The Most Unsettlingly Tan Coach At Preseason Media Days?

There is a particularly unpleasant image of Brian Daboll that I return to in my mind from time to time.

You can see it in https://defector.com/why-your-team-sucks-2024-new-york-giants">the 2024 Why Your Team Sucks entry for the New York Giants; the image in that story is a photo of my TV, from an episode in the team's turn as the subject of that season of the HBO series Hard Knocks.

Subtitles show that Daboll is saying "That guy's a stud on tape," a likely enough thing for Brian Daboll to say, but what is more notable about the image is that Daboll's lavishly bald head is the color of a ripe raspberry.

I took the photo because the shade was so upsetting that I didn't know what else to do.

Discretely contact the sunburn police?

Mail some ointments to the team offices?

Alert https://defector.com/new-york-radio-yutz-has-had-it-with-mr-mets-antisemitism">Sid Rosenberg?

Even for the decently large cohort of football coaches with more hair and sense than Daboll, this sort of thing is a hazard.

These are men who spend a lot of time outside in the sun, squinting and clapping and saying things like "That guy's a stud on tape" to each other.

That is the job, more or less.

College coaches also have to do all that while also spending countless offseason hours golfing and backslapping and confidentially saying things like "That guy's a stud on tape" to the local gentry types that keep their college football programs and NIL funds flush.

They do this so that those rich guys will have something to take back to their car dealerships and litigation concerns, but also because those are just the folkways and mores of this community.

This is not the only American micro-economy that runs on a bunch of guys who look like they're made out of the same stuff Twizzlers are made out of giving each other money and gossiping about each other behind their backs, but it might be the one that is least concerned with sunblock.

There absolutely are thousands of TikTok casualties in this great land who have worked themselves around to the belief that sunblock is the public-facing part of some longstanding elite conspiracy, and some of them surely coach football.

But for all the donkeys whose phones convinced them that the Bilderberg Group wants you to get melanoma, which is not real but can be treated with the right kind of supplements, there are many more guys who simply do not avail themselves of any kind of protection from the sun because that's something their wives do or just that their wives ask them to do, or because doing so feels too much like an act of submission either to those wives or to the ultraviolet rays of the sun.