Black Enterprise has a piece about the passing of former Dartmouth wide receiver Jimmie Lee Solomon '78, a former football player who became a baseball pioneer. It begins this way (LINK):
Leaders from the worlds of sports, business and politics are mourning the loss of Jimmie Lee Solomon, the trailblazer who broke barriers to become one of the highest-ranking executives in Major League Baseball. Among the most powerful sports executives during his 21-year tenure with MLB – from 1991 to 2012 – he influenced virtually every aspect of the nation’s favorite pastime. Moreover, the dynamic business leader sought to diversify and introduce talent to the league through establishment of urban youth academies and the annual Futures Game for top prospects, among other initiatives.
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Noted speechwriter Peter Robinson '79, a classmate of Dartmouth football coach Buddy Teevens and writer of President Ronald Reagan's 1987 Tear Down This Wall speech, interviews Wall Street Journal sports reporter Andrew Beaton in his Richochet podcast and asks how he came to write about Teevens and his role in making football safer.
Robinson introduces the subject by saying:
“I’m a Dartmouth man and Buddy Teevens is a buddy of mine."
Listen to the podcast HERE. The Beaton/Teevens discussion begins at the 48:08 mark.
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Buddy Teevens Q&A: Part I
On Friday morning I asked Buddy Teevens a selection of the questions you emailed this way. As BGA Premium subscribers well know, Dartmouth's head football coach has a way of fielding questions and then running with them. That being the case, this is the first of two parts. Part II will be posted tomorrow. Questions and answers have been gently edited for clarity . . . although not necessarily for brevity ;-)
Q: How many players are on campus this fall, and how many freshmen opted to take a gap year?
A: We have 61 players on campus. There are more in the Upper Valley, but due to the COVID restrictions we can't allow them access to facilities for our practices. All of our freshmen are here. We did not have any of them take a gap year.
Q: What was your pitch to freshmen who were deciding whether or not to start their careers this fall even though there wasn't going to be a season?
A: Our encouragement was to use this year as a redshirt opportunity, which I'm used to from scholarship football. It gives them an opportunity to transition a little bit more easily, with less pressure in the fall, and get their feet feet on the ground academically. And then they will have an extra year of eligibility. Some of them could graduate in four years and use that extra year towards potentially a scholarship in a different program for graduate study. Or they can spread their education over a five-year period, and maybe take additional internship opportunities.
Q: What are you allowed to do in practice and how are you doing it?
A: Good question. The rules we are following are very, very strict. We have zones on the field where we can work with different groups. We refer to them as pods. We have five offensive pods and three defensive pods. The pods have to be 10 players or less, which works for us on the defensive side because we have less than 10 defensive backs, less than 10 linebackers and less than 10 defensive line. So we just align those guys in pods A, B, and C by position. That allows all the guys to get together and do similar drills.
Offensively, we have two tight ends, three wide receivers and one or two running backs in each group. So the pods can run their offense. When I say run it I mean we can throw balls and not have to disinfect them. But we can't hand them off. So we do a lot of what would be perceived as “pass skel,” versus air.
Q: What more can you say about social distancing during practice?
A: Players have to always wear a mask and maintain 10 feet of distance, because you want more distance on the football field. They are doing a pretty good job with it. Because of the field space requirement, we're actually practicing over at Blackman, because Memorial Field was not deemed large enough by the people making that determination.
We have two fields at Blackman and can have only 50 people on each field at a time, with no more than 25 on each side of the field. So we've got to watch how we stretch and so forth. But it's worked out with 61 players over four big quad areas.
Q: How does practice work as a team?
A: The first two weeks we've been completely separate. Now we will work more towards incorporating them together, but we have to be creative. If we put our offensive pod C versus the defensive backs we would have all defensive backs, so we're going to use the MVPs (motorized tackling dummies) to be linebackers, which will then give the wide receivers, quarterbacks and the running backs identification with linebacker pickups. Then the secondary, because they're all in the same pod, can work the entire field. Because receivers have to keep basically five yards from the defensive backs it will be a little bit staged. But for the young guys in particular, they can see motion and movement with the offense, make their adjustments, make their calls, adjust their depth and stances, and so forth.
That will give us a chance to do as close to pass skel as we could. We can't throw the ball downfield because it would be contested by the defensive backs, and then we get too many guys bumping into each other. They want no guys violating other people's space, so to speak.
We will do some things with the offensive and defensive lines, but keep them 10 yards apart. We have 14 offensive linemen. So we group the old guys together and the young guys, and they work on separate sides of the field.
We have a special teams component as well. Again, there’s social distancing, five yards separation laterally, and five yards vertically. Right now we are just doing fundamental drills with those guys.
Q: How challenging is it designing practice plans with social distancing?
A: It's crazy trying to figure it all out. And then the school does not want the coaches coming to work. I'm considered an essential employee, thankfully, so I can come in. But the other guys are working from home. They come in for practice, and then they go home and do the rest with Zoom.
Q: It’s a different kind of practice for a lot of teams without tackling. Does that work to your advantage since you’ve been practicing that way for years?
A: It's a benefit to us because we don't use (contact) anyway. In the bigger picture, I've said this to a couple of guys, Roger Goodell included, with social distancing and all that it's forcing coaches to do what we've been doing for 10 years 12 years. So I think the coaching approach to the game potentially could change in a very positive sense. You have to deal with no contact? Well, OK, you've still got to get your guys ready to play and play well and so guys are learning how to do that.
Q: Is practicing this fall without games frustrating?
A: It tests us because it is so different. You have to have a gameplan for how you perform. It's made me think a little bit outside the box once again about OK, how are we going to do this, and how are we going to prepare our guys? It’s strange because you feel like you should be preparing for Saturday and there are no Saturdays. Sometimes I find myself thinking it’s spring practice because that’s what it feels like.
Q: How glad were to have the players back practicing, such as it is?
A: It is good for the players to be out there. I was really concerned about the mental health of some of my guys. Just the ability to get out and do something has been relieving for a lot of them. A lot of the guys that are not here are really missing it.
Q: How much time are you being allotted for practice? Is it the same as a regular fall?
A: The NCAA allows us 12 hours a week and that entails practice, meetings, and strength and conditioning. Normally in season it would be 20 hours a week. So we have three hours of strength and conditioning, three hours of virtual meetings and six hours on the field.
They've restricted us a little bit, but in the Ivy League we could have been cut back to six hours. We can't practice every day but we can get practices in, and with short numbers it kind of works out.
Q: What are the chances of there being a spring season, and would it require all eight Ivy League teams to participate?
A: We had a league meeting with the conference Commissioner two weeks ago, and that was my first question. Right now we don’t know if there will be a season. The Ivy League has said if half of the cohort is competing an Ivy champion will be named. So in football we would need four teams willing to compete. They asked me and I said if there's a championship to be played for, count Dartmouth in. We will be there.
The way it is right now, that would mean we'd be playing with just seniors and freshmen. Some schools said they don’t have the numbers and wouldn’t play. I’m not going to get into which schools they are. It’s all fluid. If a vaccination comes around and schools decide to bring all of their students back on campus things could change.
Tomorrow:
• If there’s some kind of spring season, how would that impact eligibility of this year’s seniors for next fall?
• If there is a modified spring season, when would it be held? Dartmouth’s northern location and quarter system seems like they would pose problems.
• Bottom line, will there be football games played in the spring?
• What is this fall like for a football lifer not having games for the first time in almost half a century?
And more . . .
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EXTRA POINT
Each morning one of our pseudo-local TV station tosses up a graphic with "Traffic Flow" for Vermont and New Hampshire. I find it hilarious. Barring a tie-up for removal of a beaver dam, a hay bale falling off a tractor and blocking traffic, or a wayward moose in the fast lane, it pretty much always looks like this. Sometimes the station even has the "commute time" between places like St. Johnsbury, Vt., and Lebanon, N.H. On a good day that might be 62 minutes. And on a heavy traffic day? Maybe 65. ;-)
