Holmes has something of a unique haircut -- or at least it was unique in my experience. Short on top but longish in back, it was something that might make some kind of sense in a music video (and did, in fact) but was a little unusual in real life.

"Oh, that?" Holmes' college teammate Malcolm Kelly drawled when I asked him. "That's a Dallas thing."

"It's called a 'shag,'" Holmes told me, and he's had the hairstyle for about two years, which -- we both agreed -- means that I'm completely out of touch. No real surprise there. I haven't really changed my hairstyle since 1997, and even then I wasn't going for anything quite so interesting.

Still, Holmes acknowledged that just about everybody on the team who didn't know Dallas style had asked him about it, and said, "I just tell 'em it's a booty cut. People ask, and they don't know about it till I tell 'em." Which made me feel a little bit better.

Holmes also agreed with Kelly's assessment: "All the people wearin' the hairstyle right now is everybody in Dallas."

So I started asking around the unusually large contingent of Texas-based Redskins players.

"I'm familiar with it, but it's more of a Dallas thing," Brian Orakpo said. "I'm from Houston, we don't do that."

"I think it's a Texas thing," Derrick Dockery said. "Grow the big hair in the back, low cut on the top. If you're from Texas you have all different kinds of haircuts, you know? I'd like to say we're trendsetters as far as hairstyles. From Houston you got what you call a southside: a fade where you got hair on top, and no hair around the sides and the back. I don't do nothin like that, but that's what we do."

Did you ever go for anything like that? "No," Dockery said, "no. At my home my father and mother would not allow anything like that. Nice trim cut, you know, shave the face and that was it."

"Yeah. The shag," said Trent Shelton, "yeah, it's real big. Everything's big in Dallas. The shag, the Bobby Brown, flat-tops, all that. You see it all in Dallas. Everything is different in Dallas. The way they dress. Everything, just everything's different. So when you go to Dallas, that's normal."

But, I asked, aren't you from Dallas?

"I'm actually from Ft. Worth, so it's like thirty minutes difference. We don't do that stuff in Ft. Worth. It's just Dallas boys."

Kareem Moore was in the ice tub with Shaun Suisham when I asked him about it. "The first time I saw it, a rapper had it. Tum Tum."

Suisham hadn't noticed Holmes's hair and asked Moore to describe it.

"They'll cut the top down," Moore explained, "leave the back. You feel me?"

Suisham digested this. "That's the black man's mullet," he suggested. (Mild language warning in link.)

Moore thought about it and nodded. "Kinda, yeah," he said. "You're right. Ah, they've got all kinda styles now. They got this thing, they got the southside fade...."

"I was in Dallas," Suisham said, "and I never saw it."

I asked Suisham if he'd ever considered a similar look for himself, and Moore laughed.

"No," Suisham said. "I didn't. I didn't. 'Cause I used to go through all the books and stuff, when you go in and get your haircut, and I never saw that before. I mighta tried it."

"Go and try it out now," Moore suggested.

"Might make me look kinda fast," Suisham said. Pretty much everyone in both tubs was laughing at this point.

"It does," Moore said. "Aerodynamic at the top, back is the tailwind."