Alright. Enough beating around the bush. We need to address the elephant in the room, and it’s not Derek Carr. No, the time has come for a long overdue dialogue on Dom Capers’ hair.
Coaching his fifth team in as many seasons, the well-traveled Capers—who you may recall served as the Panthers’ first head coach in franchise history from 1995-98—is back for a second stint in Carolina, this time as a senior defensive assistant under Frank Reich. A longtime assistant who got his NFL start as a Saints DBs coach in the late 80s, Capers has come a long way follicly in that time, debuting a startling hair transformation at Wednesday’s press conference.
Whether the victim of a lazy dye job or a particularly unconvincing toupee, nothing about Capers’ appearance looked even remotely natural, inspiring countless memes and references to similar hair catastrophes, including a memorable stunt pulled by Creed Bratton on The Office, trying (unsuccessfully) to disguise his graying features with black printer ink.
Capers’ hair journey isn’t for us to judge, though rather than jump through all these aesthetic hoops out of some misplaced sense of vanity, why not embrace his age by letting his remaining lettuce grow—or not grow—as nature intended? The NFL is littered with proudly-bald coaches, most of them much younger than Capers, who turns 73 this summer. Capers also has the option to wear a hat, a luxury not afforded to former NBA All-Star Carlos Boozer, who went to exceptionally drastic lengths to mask his baldness before finally accepting his plight as one of approximately 35 percent of adult males who experience hair loss in some capacity.
Luckily, the Panthers didn’t hire Capers for his hairline, instead drawing on his 30+ years of NFL coaching experience, including winning a Super Bowl as Green Bay’s defensive coordinator in 2010.
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