Today's Valley News has a remembrance of former Dartmouth football coach Joe Yukica, who passed away last month at age 90. From the story (LINK):
(T)he new coach and his talented staff energized a team with few standout returnees, including (Buddy) Teevens, an undersized, little-known senior quarterback.
Teevens, who recently completed his 20th season as Big Green coach, divided over two terms, enrolled as one of 10 freshmen quarterbacks. He played a bit as a junior but, along with his classmates, was concerned that the incoming coach would “flush” them and embark on a full-scale rebuilding project.
Instead, Yukica featured his oldest players, although he moved some to different positions and installed an offense based more on the pass. They repaid their coach’s confidence with belief, feeding off his calm but intense personality and noting that this man knew their sport inside and out.
“He was a big guy with a presence and if you did something wrong, he’d stare at you over his reading glasses,” Teevens recalled. “But he made football fun and he was open to suggestion and we felt like we were working on this together.”
Dartmouth won the Ivy League title in its first year under Yukica, who finished with a 36-24-3 Ivy League record and three conference championships over his nine seasons. Astonishingly, Yukica's teams never won a nonconference game, due in large part to a nonconference schedule regularly featuring New Hampshire and Holy Cross, then a national powerhouse. Perhaps the most memorable nonconference game was a 13-12 loss at Army in 1983 when four Craig Saltzgaber field goals gave the Big Green a 12-0 halftime lead, only to have Army roar back for the win in front of 36,637 at Michie Stadium.
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Just as Joe Yukica mentored Buddy Teevens, the current Dartmouth coach had an impact on another young coach. From a Denver Post story about new Broncos head coach Nathaniel Hackett (LINK):
Nathaniel Hackett was set to remain at Davis and attend graduate school until a former Davis assistant coach, Keith Buckley, called him about the chance to work at Stanford for coach Buddy Teevens. Hackett was hired as an assistant to the coordinators in the fall of 2003.
“Basically prep for just about anything from an offensive standpoint,” said Teevens, the coach at Dartmouth since 2005. “You have a young guy come in and you give him what he can handle and they loaded him up. He was meticulous about the details, very good with the follow-up work. He was impressive right off the bat. … There wasn’t a clock for him. He was in at the crack of dawn and stayed until the job was done. Tireless.”
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From a column by The Analyst's Craig Haley headlined All-Star Game Boost: Five FCS Risers for the NFL Draft (LINK):
EJ Perry
The Skinny: Winning a positional practice player of the week honor is a good sign to NFL scouts, but Perry’s second half at the Shrine Bowl was nothing short of spectacular – he completed 13 of 18 passes for 241 yards and three touchdowns plus ran in a pair of two-point conversions to earn Offensive MVP. At the least, the heady Perry (6-1½, 212) can provide a change of pace at the next level, including on designed runs.
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EXTRA POINT
Three of us hiked across our field and down into the adjacent sugarbush yesterday. Two of us were wearing snowshoes and one had bare (but furry) feet. Mrs. BGA and I went diagonally toward the sugarbush while Griff the Wonder Dog occasionally departed from the straight and narrow as you can see in a photo shot just after sunrise today on a 9.5-below zero morning:
