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 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 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 who 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.
You have to understand that these are powerful men. They are in charge of things like a regional Jeep dealership or the LSU football program, and as such they do not take kindly to the idea that the sun's harmful rays would have any sort of dominion over them. Better to appear on Hard Knocks saying "That guy's a stud on tape" while looking like a bearded Craisin than to live on your knees before the realities of what prolonged direct exposure to the sun does to human skin. To look like this sends a quiet but unmistakable message to other men who look like this. It is a curt and crispy nod exchanged between alphas that says "I am not afraid of the sun, either."
During the media days for college football's power conferences that have run during the last two weeks of July, coaches have taken their place behind podiums and in front of backdrops bearing the names and logos of their conferences and programs and sent that nod out into the universe. They are all saying the same things, more or less, because there is only so much to say about college football in July. But they are also sending the same message.
Bret Bielema, seen above, has been in the game long enough that he was once an entirely different sort of college football coach—the kind who would get photographed shirtless holding some sort of pinkish drink while making The Rob Riggle Face. That type of coach eventually ages and sun-dries into this one. The image of Lane Kiffin atop this story, where he looks kind of like circa-now David Lee Roth, is a look at what this process looks like while it is happening.
Jon Sumrall, seen above in his first media day as the new head coach at Florida, is less visually startling than Bielema not because his suntan is less intense than because it is so uniform. Bielema looks like someone who has been in the sun too much. Sumrall looks like a tamari almond.
Tennessee's Josh Heupel is also extremely tan, but is notable mostly because he looks like someone who should be, and in point of fact actually is, extremely pale. The Josh Heupel that you might see in your mind, or on his page on Tennesee's website, is a pinkish and baby-style man. The Josh Heupel you see above is, among other things, much toastier.
It's worth noting here that the ACC is not represented in this survey not because its coaches have more respect for basic skin care best practices than their peers, but because their media days events appear to have been very strangely staged and photographed. I can't speak to the specific lighting decisions made in the room, but our photo service includes at least one image of every ACC coach doing what Bill Belichick is doing here:
So, obviously, apologies to the coaches of the ACC if they are the only people in the sport willing to smear some SPF on their foreheads and noses, and their event's lighting made it impossible to tell. It would be both unkind and unethical to assume anything about Dabo Swinney's understanding of how this sort of thing works, so it's much safer to just assume he's being normal about it.
Anyway, you are getting the point. I will give Eliah Drinkwitz credit for being so committed to his haircut that you can see which parts of his forehead see constant unobstructed sun and which never, ever see any.
Kalen DeBoer was born and raised in South Dakota, but his rise through the coaching ranks had carried him through sunnier climes and ruddied him up pretty well by the time he took over at the University of Washington. That version of DeBoer had the even, prosperous tan of a successful college football coach. The version of him that appeared at SEC media days had the complexion of a photographic negative.
But, again, this is the gig, and the difference between a job at Washington and the job at Alabama. In the Pacific Northwest, in a conference like the terminal-phase Pac-12, it might be enough for a coach to merely look tan. In the SEC, at Bama, the mission is different, and so the message must be as well. A Washington coach can get away with seeming extremely well-acquainted with the sun. At Alabama, at the bare minimum, the coach must send the message that he is out there every day trying to defeat it.
