Barry Melrose

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It remains a mystery as to how Barry “The Mullet” Melrose achieves his signature coiff before his current afternoon gig as a hockey analyst and commentator for ESPN. We’ll assume for now that Melrose simply forgot one day that it was, in fact, not 1988, and accordingly chose to smooth down the hair behind his ears with a horsehair brush and a hefty bottle of Krazy Glue. It is rumored that Barry’s hair has not moved of its own accord since his final season playing hockey with the Adironhack RedWings — more than twenty years ago — and that he and fellow hair gel connoisseur Pauly D of Jersey Shore fame trade styling secrets on a near-daily basis. Melrose has defended his personal style by claiming to be merely a zealous supporter of the “playoff mullet” — an offshoot of the “playoff beard” that some superstitious hockey players sport in an attempt to ward off game losses — but the preferred theory that his hair spontaneously achieved consciousness, got lost somewhere in a discotheque-cum-biker-bar, and just never bothered to venture back outside.

Mel Kiper

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For kicks, comic hero mutant Wolverine might try subpeona-ing world-famous NFL Draft commentator Mel Kiper for a DNA test, then revelling in all that child support back pay. (Just marvel at that Widow’s Peak!) Affectionately termed “Helmet Head,” Kiper has quite an intense hair following — there’s a Fan Club on Facebook and a now-abandoned twitter feed maintained by sports blogger Mel Kiper’s Hair, as well as no shortage of Kiper commentary parodies on Youtube that portray the wolfish analyst with what looks variously like a skunk, beaver, or [insert woodland creature here] placed precariously atop his crown. In an ESPN.com interview, when asked whether it bothered him that people talked so much about his hair, Kiper replied, “No, I laugh about it. That, to me, started in the 80’s, when it was probably longer than it should have been.” Looks like someone should have given Barry Melrose a hint.

Marv Albert

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It’s been, perhaps, the number one question among sports fans and sports commentator-fans alike: Is it, or isn’t it, a toupee?

Though Albert has newly-minted street cred thanks to a 2009 scuffle with rapper 50 Cent on the set of “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” he refuses — perhaps out of a misguided sense of gentlemanly pride, or a desire to cement his legacy as “Person With The Cajones To Wear the Cheapest-Looking Hair Piece on National Television, Daily, for Forty Years” — to update his 1960’s “Beatles-groupie” look. Strangely enough, even with his recent abuse scandal and subsequent media embattlement, the hair piece has never looked better, more fresh, more spookily alive.

But come on, Marv. Even McCartney had to nix the bowl cut at some point.

Jimmy Johnson

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Wait, how did Captain Kirk get on this list?

Oops, my mistake: turns out multi-hypenate Jimmy Johnson — former Survivor Star, football coach, Fox Sunday Night Football Analyst, and Denorex Dandruff Shampoo promoter — looks like he could be just as comfortable commanding the Enterprise as he is winning multiple, back-to-back football championships. There’s really no reason for him to be on this list, except to showcase him shamelessly upstaging his competitors.

With hair like this, how could he not?

Alan Partridge

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The best-worst hair award, finally, goes to our favorite ersatz English sports commentator, Alan Partridge — truly the ultimate (and, to my mind, the only) tribute to the harried world of sports commentating. A hilarious parody of announcers and commentators worldwide, Partridge is a fictional creation of comedian Steve Coogan. Coogan’s mastery of the paradoxical nature of sports-commentating hair is near perfect: It moves yet doesn’t move, appears to sway, but most assuredly does not; at times, it even attempts to make itself into a shape before failing spectacularly. Moreover, it’s shiny and bouncy, but stiff and patrician at the same time. It provokes bar fights as well as spurs aesthetes to intellectual conversation. Maybe Melrose, Albert, Johnson, and Kiper could learn a thing or two from this guy.