UNDER NEW COACH Bill O’Brien, the Penn State Nittany Lions have dispensed with their former grooming standards and are now permitted to look as scruffy as the rest of the nation. Players can wear baseball caps, bandanas, long hair, goatees and any facial hairstyles they choose. If it looks like a billy goat with earrings, it must be a hard-working athlete.

Joe Ames writes:

Notice studiousness comes as an afterthought in the new coach’s listing of attributes. Blue collar comes first. 

Indeed. PSU is a blue collar place, despite its pretensions, especially as revealed by the Sandusky brutalization and ensuing fiasco.

This is going to be a hoot, watching the Nittany Lions transform themselves into niggaz and rednecks that are indistinguishable from the [deleted] teenagers at the local mall on a Friday night.

Paterno was a moral coward but at least he paid homage to Brown’s WASP elite and their subsequently pummeled-to-oblivion culture that gave his family a real chance at the American good life.

Go State.

Or whatever they will call it by this time next year.

— Comments —

Mary writes:

This action is tantamount to parents who want to be friends with their kids. This coach is trying to buy the regard of his players by indulging their vanity – and it is vanity. The kids who like the grunge look spend tons of time in front of the mirror perfecting that just-got-out-of-bed-je-ne-sais-quoi. I guess it hasn’t occurred to this coach that Penn State football players, or football players in general, might tend already to be a little full of themselves and might need to be taken down a notch for their own good; that adhering to a sort of good-grooming code requires a deeper commitment from his players; and that allowing them to worry about their hair, earrings etc. is, well…kind of girly. Last time I checked, the full range of high-level athletics required tremendous discipline. Requiring these young men to have short, maintenance-free haircuts, against their collective will, is a wise and expedient training practice: after all, he is trying to train their wills –  is he not? – to teach obedience and strict adherence to a course of action on the field. Otherwise you lose, just as an untrained will causes you to lose in life.

It is a full-time job these days for young people to keep up with this prevailing culture of ours. They are judged on their cultural choices almost to the complete disregard of finer things; qualities and virtues aren’t considered important. They are defined not only by their looks: their clothes, where their jeans sit on their hips, hair, facial hair, makeup, the vibe they project, tatoos, piercings, weight, how honed their muscles are, eyebrow shape (even for boys now), amount of chest hair (hopefully only for boys!) etc. – but perhaps more importantly by their cultural choices: what music they listen to, what TV shows they are up on, what movies they love, what trends they choose to take part in, what their facebook pages looks like, twittering choices, etc etc etc. By these things people are judged. It’s as if the water cooler has become the world – it’s that superficial. This keeps our young people busy and preoccupied, and crowds out any deeper considerations, the kind that make for long and happy friendships, and marriages, and stable societies. I have deep sympathy for them – they know not what they do.

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