A Well Groomed Coach

This is Blaine Taylor. He coaches Old Dominion. He’s had this mustache for a long time. He had it when he coached at the University of Montana. Not long ago it was the subject of an interview by Dan Steinberg of the Washington Post. The reporter talked with several of Blaine’s players and they had some interesting comments. The coach himself had some as well;

“We love the mustache,” forward Nick Wright told me. “We love that. That’s what keeps us going. We go to an away game, and everybody wants to say, ‘Hey, Blaine, the mustache, blah blah.. That guy has a winning team with that mustache.”

 “Oh, it’s horrible,” said starting shooting guard Kent Bazemore. “Four years, you know what I mean. You can’t see his top lip, all you can see is this,” he said, putting his finger over his lip. “It’s easy to make eye contact with coach; you just look at his mustache and follow that.”

 “I’m not gonna speak on the subject, because I’ve got to play here for four more years,” freshman Richard Ross said, before eventually comparing Taylor to Stan Van Gundy and praising the stache for being “well-groomed.”

Clearly it was time to move on to Taylor himself. “It’s because you can’t see me swearing on TV,” he joked, before John Feinstein assured him that you could, in fact, see him swearing on TV. “It becomes a little bit more of a curiosity, like the Jeff Fishers of the world. I’ve just had a mustache all the time. I don’t know. I’m just an old western sheriff, I guess.”

By Dan Steinberg  |  01:09 PM ET, 03/16/2011

PS: Blaine’s team won their conference tourney, and then lost in the first round of the NCAA tourney.