Mike Gundy’s Mullet: How a Small-Town Coach Became an Unlikely Export of American Anxiety

Mike Gundy, the Oklahoma State University head football coach whose mullet once qualified as a diplomatic incident in several NATO countries, has improbably become a case study in how American provincialism still manages to ricochet across the planet like a rogue drone over the Black Sea. In a week when French farmers dumped manure on the Champs-Élysées, when Japanese markets discovered yet another sushi data-fudging scandal, and when the International Court of Justice issued a non-binding shrug about genocide, Gundy’s latest sideline sermon on “liberal agendas” landed with the soft thud of a familiar punchline heard from Budapest to Brisbane: America’s heartland still thinks the world ends at the Red River.

From the vantage point of a café terrace in Sarajevo—where locals have actual recent experience with real existential threats—Gundy’s declaration that modern college athletes are “soft” because they’d prefer not to be unpaid interns in a billion-dollar industry sounded almost quaint. Here, the barista who served my macchiato survived the siege; she knows soft. In Lagos, where the national football team still hasn’t been paid bonuses from last year’s AFCON run, the concept of complaining about too much empathy for 19-year-olds is what passes for late-night satire. And in Seoul, where K-League clubs just launched a mental-health hotline after two players took their own lives, Gundy’s tough-love gospel reads like a fossilized coaching manual from the Mesozoic era.

Yet the global ripple is undeniable. Every time a middle-American icon waves a metaphorical cattle prod at “wokeness,” authoritarian regimes from Caracas to Minsk scribble another talking point on the whiteboard labeled “See, the West is weak.” Russian state television—never one to miss an opportunity—spliced Gundy’s rant between segments on decadent Western values, right after the weather forecast promising minus-thirty in Norilsk and right before a cooking segment on how to pickle despair. Chinese social media, meanwhile, translated the tirade with helpful subtitles suggesting American universities are crumbling under the weight of… basic human resources compliance. Even the Taliban weighed in, congratulating Gundy for defending “traditional masculinity,” which is rich coming from a movement still negotiating with the concept of women’s literacy.

Of course, the joke is on them, because Gundy’s brand of performative grievance is itself a product of the very global economy he pretends to ignore. The Nike swoosh on his polo? Manufactured in Vietnamese sweatshops. The streaming deal that beams his press conferences to gamblers in Singapore? Financed by hedge funds domiciled in the Cayman Islands. The oil money that built Boone Pickens Stadium? Pumped through the same petrodollar recycling system that keeps London real estate agents in Aston Martins. Somewhere in Davos, a consultant is billing $1,200 an hour to explain how Coach Gundy’s anti-cosmopolitan shtick actually reinforces global capital flows—irony being the one commodity never subject to sanctions.

And so we arrive at the larger, drearily predictable significance: in 2024, even the most parochial American tantrum is instantly weaponized by every ideological grifter with Wi-Fi. The planet has become a giant feedback loop where a red-faced coach in Stillwater inadvertently bolsters talking points in Pyongyang, while a meme of his mullet circulates on encrypted channels used by European neo-fascists who think “Cowboys” is a lifestyle brand. Meanwhile, the actual college athletes—some from Nigeria, others from Norway—just want to finish their degrees before the NCAA’s house of cards collapses under the weight of its own antitrust violations.

In the end, Gundy’s weekly outrage is less a threat to Western civilization than a reminder that the world remains stubbornly interconnected, whether a middle-aged man in a visor likes it or not. The same satellites that broadcast his rants also deliver Ukrainian battlefield updates to his iPhone, the same supply chains that ship orange turf to Boone Pickens Stadium also carry fentanyl precursors from Wuhan labs to Tulsa suburbs. Globalization, like a linebacker blitzing on 3rd-and-long, doesn’t care about your feelings—or your haircut.