Why every Cowboy fan should love The Mullet
ESTILLWATER — arlier this week, Oklahoma State’s annual Coaches vs. Cancer golf tournament drew quite the crowd. Burns Hargis and Mike Holder made appearances. Ditto for Mike Gundy, John Smith and Mike Boynton.
But the biggest attention-getter was The Mullet.
If you’ve seen the most recent photos of the Cowboy football coach’s hair, you know it has reached the capitalization stage. It is a stand-alone entity. It is a force unto itself.
And if you’re thinking, “Yeah, yeah, I saw it during spring football,” that mullet was nowhere close to what Gundy has now. It isn’t in “Joe Dirt” territory, but Gundy could conceivably be the first head coach in the history of Division-I football to wear his hair in a ponytail.
Remember when Troy Polamalu used to take off his helmet and the Steelers safety’s hair would poof out all over the place?
So it goes with Gundy’s hair.
You can’t control The Mullet. You can only hope to contain it —and that seems less and less likely with each passing day.
Even though this hair hijinks is a bit unorthodox in a college football world where coaches are more CEO than REO Speedwagon, Cowboy fans largely seem to be on board with their football coach’s choice of hair style. For those who aren’t, though, I have a suggestion.
Get used to it. The Mullet isn’t going anywhere — except maybe further down Gundy’s back — and frankly, I can’t see why anyone who bleeds orange wouldn’t be on board. The ‘do has been nothing but good for the Cowboys.
For starters, here we are at the end of May talking about OSU football. Yes, things are a wee bit quiet around here since the Thunder took an early exit out of the NBA playoffs, but The Mullet has reach beyond our fair state.
In February, for example, Gundy did a segment on SportsCenter with fellow mullet man Barry Melrose. They debated what constitutes a true mullet. They talked about the importance of genes in growing a good mullet. They discussed what product works best. Goofy? Sure. But Gundy and OSU football were front and center on ESPN at a time when there wasn’t a whole heck of a lot of reason for the Cowboys to get any air time, much less five whole minutes.
Try to buy that much unfettered time on national TV, and it would cost thousands.
OSU got it for free because of The Mullet.
What’s more, that ESPN segment prompted coverage by USA Today, SB Nation and The Big Lead among other national publications. Again, none of those entities had any reason to be giving OSU headlines in late February, but The Mullet made it so.
That’s just one instance where The Mullet brought attention to OSU. Pretty much every time Gundy goes off the radar for a bit, then resurfaces, people want to know how the locks look. That creates more tweets, more blogs, more mentions and more buzz for the Cowboys.
Sure, there have been jabs at Gundy. After rattlesnake hunting photos surfaced earlier this spring, some folks joked about the color of the neck under The Mullet. Red was the prevailing hue.
Comparisons were even made to Billy Ray Cyrus circa “Achy Breaky Heart.”
It’s gotten to the point where it’s hard to remember what Gundy looked like without The Mullet.
Go find some old photos of him, and you’ll realize how weird it is to see him without the party in the back.
And why not keep it? After all, the business part of The Mullet has been good for Gundy and even better for the Cowboys.