Buddy Teevens imagined a better way forward for college football

The longtime Dartmouth coach died at 66 earlier this week, but his ideas and legacy shouldn't go away with him

Dartmouth football coach Eugene “Buddy” Teevens died Tuesday at 66 years old.

His passing was the result of complications from a March accident when Teevens was struck by a Ford F150 going 50 miles per hour while he and his wife were bicycling home at night from a restaurant in St. Augustine, Fla. (Florida Highway Patrol reported at the time that Teevens was struck while not in a designated crossing area and that his bicycle had no illuminated lights on it). As a result of the collision, Teevens suffered spinal cord injuries and had his right leg amputated.

If you, ostensibly a college sports or college football fan, are reading this, there’s a reasonable chance you’ve either never heard of Teevens or know little about him.

This isn’t to denigrate an accomplished individual just days after he died. Over the course of his career, including his final years, Teevens was profiled in major, mainstream media outlets like the New York Times and The Athletic. News of his passing was covered or at least mentioned in some way by virtually every sports publication with a national audience. He helped put on the famed Manning Passing Academy in Louisiana for 26 years. He was an FBS head coach for eight years, a Power Five head coach for three and coached under Steve Spurrier for three years at the end of the coach’s decorated tenure at Florida.

But in a sport in which coaches are the domineering, omnipresent figures of interest, Teevens was never the household name he should have been. 

It’s a shame, really. There are few, if any, coaches in the history of college football who worked harder to make the sport a safer and more sustainable place than Teevens.

Buddy Teevens’ bold idea – and how it paid off

In 2010, heading into the sixth season of his second stint at Dartmouth, Teevens presented his staff and those around the program with a radical proposal – he wanted to eliminate full-contact, player-on-player tackling from Big Green practices.

While testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations for a hearing on concussions in youth football, Teevens said his staff thought he was kidding and was waiting for a punchline. Surely, there was no way a football coach would suggest eliminating one of the sport’s central elements from the practices meant to prepare, shape and fine-tune his players for games?