Wednesday, April 10, 2024

A Special Tribute

Today a guest column by a researcher who worked closely with former Dartmouth football coach Buddy Teevens. This appeared in the spring 2024 issue of HEADWAY and is reproduced here with permission.


A Personal Remembrance of Buddy Teevens
by Jonathan D. Lichtenstein, PsyD, MBA

Buddy Teevens was a staunch advocate for brain injury prevention, an innovator in ways to make football safer. He passed away this past September. He was 66 years old.

Buddy was the head coach of Dartmouth Colleges football program for 23 years across two distinct stints leading the Big Green. In his first campaign in the late 80s and early 90s, Buddy successfully recruited a disciplined placekicker from Connecticut, my brother Jason. Growing up, l attended an uncountable number of Dartmouth games, both home and away, watching my brother drive kickoff after kickoff deep into opponent territory. When I came to Dartmouth in 2013, Buddy was already back for his second tour of duty in Hanover. My brother, also living here, had been a longtime supporter of the program as an alum and one of Buddy's former players. He told Buddy about me and my focus in neuropsychology and traumatic brain injuries.

Shortly after starting my job at Dartmouth, Buddy Teevens started calling me on the phone. It felt unreal. We texted regularly (Buddy embraced the thumbs up emoji like no one else) and often chatted about our shared interest in head injury prevention. He would always call me when he returned from a coach's summit, or a high level NCAA meeting about safety. "I spoke to this guy, I think you know him," or "I listened to their ideas and it all makes sense - it's what we've been doing." He had so much intellectual curiosity, as he tried to figure out how to best protect his players - not just for Saturday, but for the rest of their lives.

Buddy's humble nature was always remarkable. He single-handedly changed the culture of football forever, but he just acted like he was the luckiest guy in the room. Happy to be along for the ride. In reality, he was often the smartest guy in the room. Brave, entrepreneurial, enthusiastic, thinking ahead of the curve. He embodied the Dartmouth spirit and grew to define its ethos.

One of the proudest moments in my academic career was presenting alongside Buddy at the Ivy League/Big Ten summit in 2016. Buddy was talking about his approach and techniques for non-tackle practices, and I was weighing in on the concussion outcomes data that followed. It was particularly fun presenting with Buddy that year because Dartmouth had just won the Ivy League title. Despite never tackling another player in practice, Dartmouth was a powerhouse on defense. Discussing how safety could be paired with improved performance and winning, in front of Big Ten athletics representatives, made us feel a bit like Daniel in the lion's den. But we had the numbers and the graphs to show that it worked. Buddy was a football visionary, and I was the guy trying to translate it into objective analysis. It was awesome. I only wish I had done more in that domain before he left us.

Buddy was such a strong supporter of me and my career. When I wanted to study concussion's effect on the central auditory system, he was a cheerleader, opening up the football program's doors to our study team. When the Mobile Virtual Player (a remote-controlled mobile tackling dummy) was just getting started, he invited me to pursue research questions and I surveyed players and coaches on their satisfaction of using the device. I presented those findings to the MVP's board of directors, which was a great learning experience for me early in my career. When CNN came to do a story on Buddy and his practice methods, he called me up. "Hey J – are you free right now? CNN is down here at the field and I told them about you." Next thing I know, I'm being interviewed by Ana Cabrera, talking about concussion prevention. We were a team, and that was incredibly special to me. I will never forget when Buddy said to me, "I love it - I'm working with a Lichtenstein again!" Since I was a kid, I looked up to my brother, and by proximity, I looked up to Buddy. Working with him, I simultaneously felt like a kid, while solving very adult problems.

Buddy shared the spotlight. He didn't want the attention, even though he deserved it. He wanted to collaborate rather than revel in his own personal successes. This is the essence of what I try to impart to my team and my trainees. Do not put yourself first. The team is the most important component and we all work better when we work together. These are some elements of leadership I learned from Buddy Teevens, and I will continue to teach them long after he's gone.

Writing this, I am incredibly sad. I am sad because of all the work that was still to be done by Buddy by his team and by those who consider themselves part of his family. I'm sad for the student athletes who would have played for him and won't. I'm sad because lost potential is one of the worst things that we can face. I'm sad because of the moments that I won't get to share with Buddy. I'm sad because we recently published a peer-reviewed paper showing the association between using the MVP in practice and reduced concussion risk, and he doesn't know about it. I want to call him and tell him about the publication. I want to share the success with him, and all the successes to come. I'm sad that I can no longer do that.

Everything I do from now on in the space of brain injury prevention – from concussion research to clinical care to training to community service - will be done with the memory of this extraordinary human being in mind.

Dr. Lichtenstein is the Director of Neuropsychological Services at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, where he also leads the Pediatric Neuropsychology and Sports Neuropsychology programs. He is a consultant to concussion management programs at middle schools, high schools, and colleges in New Hampshire, and is the Team Neuropsychologist for Dartmouth College Athletics, also serving as Site Co-PI for the Big Ten-Ivy League Epidemiology of Concussion Study.

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Season tickets for Dartmouth football go on sale Thursday with incentives for those purchasing early. Here's a sampling from the press release announcing the sale (LINK):

Fans who renew their season tickets by Friday, April 19 are then eligible for these prizes: (only eligible for season ticket renewals)

* Pair of pre-game sideline passes to Penn Game (4 winners chosen)
• Honorary coin toss captain for one game (game TBD | 1 winner chosen)
* Golf with Robert L. Blackman Head Football Coach Sammy McCorkle (up to 3 guests | 1 winner chosen)
* Autographed team-used Dartmouth football (1 football | 1 winner chosen)
* Dartmouth branded Nike Jacket (1 jacket | 1 winner chosen)

There are different incentives for those who purchase by April 26, May 3, May 10 and May 17.

This is toward the bottom of the release, which features a graphic showing ticket prices "based off stadium sightlines":

The increased ticket prices of the 2024 football season helps deliver a distinctive student-athlete experience in an ever-changing college athletics landscape.

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This is former Dartmouth pass rusher Flo Orimolade of the Toronto Argonauts: 

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Can you believe Harvard alum Ryan Fitzpatrick threw for more yards in his NFL career than Phil Simms and Tony Romo? A story about FCS quarterbacks trending down in the NFL includes this (LINK):

Since the 1979 NFL Draft was the first to involve FCS players, there have been 60 quarterback selections from the lower tier of NCAA Division I college football.

None were taken in last year’s draft and none are expected to be selected in this year’s draft, which will be held from April 25-27 in Detroit.

Here's the eye-catcher: 

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A story about the Dartmouth basketball union vote in The Atlantic under the headline The Logical End Point of College Sports; If players are workers, schools will have to pay them includes this specific detail I had missed (LINK):

As they told me and other journalists, they mostly just want the $16.25-an-hour minimum wage paid to all student employees, including their own student managers. Basketball, they argue, is their campus job.

The writer, a recent Dartmouth graduate, doesn't pull his punches in his lede:

Cade Haskins averaged just 0.9 points a game this season for one of the worst teams in all of Division I college basketball. And yet he may turn out to be responsible for triggering one of the biggest changes in the sport’s history.

Last month, in a small HR office above the only sports bar in Hanover, New Hampshire, Haskins and his teammates on the Dartmouth College basketball squad voted to form the first-ever NCAA players’ union. Their goal: to collectively bargain with the school for wages in exchange for playing basketball. Dartmouth had six wins and 21 losses this year, good enough for dead last in the Ivy League—itself not nationally competitive—and 334th out of 362 Division I basketball teams. No player on the current roster was alive the last time Dartmouth had a winning season, and the program hasn’t qualified for the March Madness tournament since 1959. 

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From a story in the Harvard Crimson headlined, ‘Early to Call It Doomsday’: Athletic Director Says Lack of NIL Collective Won’t Hurt Harvard Athletics (LINK):

Harvard Athletic Director Erin McDermott pushed back against concerns that Harvard’s lack of a name, image, and likeness collective could make it fall behind other programs competitively.

And . . . 

McDermott also said during the interview that the Athletics Department would “allow” undergraduate sports teams to pursue unionization if there was interest.

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And finally, still another Sign of the Apocalypse out of Colorado (LINK): 

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EXTRA POINT
Please excuse the premature use of the expression "jumped the shark" HERE regarding certain commercials airing during the NCAA Tournament(s).

This is jumping the shark:

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