football and facial follicles

Last spring, I blogged on a report from the New York Times Style section on their assertion that beards were becoming trendy. However, somebody forgot to send that memo to the Sports section, whose staff seems entirely hung up on the fact that NFL quarterbacks Jake Plummer and Ben Roethlisberger wear full beards.

I'm not quite sure what makes the Times so uncomfortable or consider it so unusual for an athlete to have facial hair. The Denver Post and Chicago Tribune wrote about Plummer's beard too, but without the same kind of creature-from-another-planet angle that the Times loves to adopt.