Dartblog

For a while there the hounds were baying for Buddy’s head, but the football team’s strong showing at Brown and its two wins in its last four games seem to have shut them up. However, let’s put the question out there again, but ask it from a management perspective: Should Buddy be canned?

First off, who would replace him? You don’t fire someone unless you have a sense that you could find someone better. Firing is not punishment; it should be a step to improvement.

When Buddy returned here in January, 2005, after stints as head coach at Tulane, as an assistant at Illinois and at the University of Florida under Steve Spurrier, and after three less-than-successful seasons as head coach at Pac-10 Stanford, he was deviating from an upward career path. At that time there was no better coach in the country available to come to 1-9 Dartmouth — and Buddy probably took a big pay cut in order to return to his alma mater.

Fire Buddy now and what kind of coach could we recruit, especially for the same money? Certainly there is nobody as strong as Buddy on paper, and nobody at all with an alum’s loyalty (especially given that he comes from one of Dartmouth’s greatest classes).

Secondly, what has Buddy done wrong, other than lose a lot of games? I don’t recall egregious coaching errors, or acts of team indiscipline due to poor choices in recruiting and mentoring, and I have not heard of discontent among the players. Buddy has made do with relatively small-sized players and he has contended with numerous injuries.

So why has the turnaround been so hard? Well, recall that Buddy’s first team was not recruited by him, and it was composed of players that had made it past Karl Furstenberg’s Admissions Department. King Karl the Arrogant had a reputation among Dartmouth coaches that is not printable in a family blog. Most of them can name numerous recruits who did not pass muster with Furstenberg, but who went on to fine careers with other Ivy schools.

But the real damage that Furstenberg caused was with his famous letter (click the thumbnail to the left to read it in relevant part) which surfaced in the month before Buddy came back to Hanover and which put a crimp in his recruiting efforts for several years — certainly until Furstenberg, ahem, retired (remember, nobody is ever fired at Dartmouth) in the summer of 2007. Other Ivy coaches no doubt dined out on this letter.

Fortunately, the new Director of Admissions, Maria Laskaris, is far easier for coaches like Teevens to work with. Want proof? Buddy’s present team is now stacked with underclass starters. On Saturday Brown had nine seniors on offence; Dartmouth had only three.

Needless to say, Buddy Teevens is too much of a gentleman to lay any blame at Karl Furstenberg’s feet, and I have not spoken with him about these matters, but Dartblog loves the truth even more than good graces — so, folks, as Walter Cronkite used to say, that’s the way it is, or at least, was.

At this point, I think that we can safely say that Dartmouth’s football program is on its way. Sure it was a slow start, but Buddy now has a talented group of coaches who give him good advice, and his core of young players will mature into winners. Freshmen Greg Patton, Justin Foley, Garrett Wymore and Garret Waggoner, along with sophomores Nick Schwieger, Diego Fernandez-Soto, Shawn Abuhoff, Eddie Smith, Mark Dwyer, Kyle Cook, Connor Kempre, Austen Fletcher, Anthony Diblasi, John Gallagher and Michael Reilly will be the nucleus of powerful teams in the years to come.

Let’s keep Coach. We’ll play .500 ball next year and win the Ivies in a year or two after that.

JOE MALCHOW wonders if his colleague has not summoned too much charity for the cause of a coach with a proven ability to lose both with and without benefit of a friendly admissions office. Even in the midst of Furstendrang there was ample quarry for Mr. Teevens. Readers who follow Ivy League football more closely than me are invited to send thoughts on Teevens. I rather think the conversion of the College against him must be complete, my colleague’s note notwithstanding.