Dartmouth named Eugene “Buddy” Teevens as its new head football coach on Jan. 5, putting an end to a sometimes contentious search process that began with the firing of former coach John Lyons on Nov. 30.
Teevens, who quarterbacked the Green to an Ivy League title in 1978, coached his alma mater from 1987 to 1991. Most recently, he had been the head coach at Stanford for the last three seasons.
“Everyone says that timing in life is everything,” stated Dartmouth athletic director Josie Harper in making the announcement. “The time is perfect for Buddy to return to Hanover to combine two of his passions — his expertise and knowledge in the game of football and his love for Dartmouth College.”
“It’s a great thing for Dartmouth, I’m sure that he knows how to get it done, and he brings a Division I background,” said Cornell head coach Jim Knowles ’87, who served as an assistant coach at Cornell during Teevens’ first tenure in Hanover.
The hiring marked the end of a very difficult month at Dartmouth. Shortly after Lyons was dismissed, the Valley News reported the contents of a letter that Dartmouth admissions dean Karl Furstenberg sent to Swarthmore College president Alfred Bloom in 2000, congratulating Bloom on Swarthmore’s decision to drop its varsity football program. The letter, which was written on Fursternberg’s Dartmouth letterhead, created a firestorm among alumni.
Dartmouth president James Wright and Harper both released statements supporting Furstenberg in the days following the Valley News’s report.
“That has to be a really difficult situation to work with and recruit under,” Knowles said in response to the controversy. “It’s all about people. You have to have support, and we try to make a real effort to make sure that we do that.”
In Teevens, Dartmouth has hired a high-profile coach with a successful past in the program. He was named Ivy League player of the year during his senior season of 1978 after leading the Green to a league title. After coaching stops at DePauw, Boston University and Maine, he returned to the Green in 1987, where he compiled a 26-22-2 record in five years, including back-to-back league championships in 1990 and 1991.
Teevens later coached at Tulane, before being a member of the coaching staffs of Ron Turner at Illinois and Steve Spurrier at Florida.
He becomes the third consecutive coach hired in the Ivy League to be an Ancient Eight graduate, joining Columbia’s Bob Shoop (Yale ’88) and Knowles.
“I think it just shows you that the way we do business is so different than anything else out there,” Knowles said. “It’s a totally different animal, having people who have been recruited by an Ivy League school, and attended one, and are familiar with all the pressures that go along with being a student and an athlete at one.”
Archived article by Owen Bochner
Sun Sports Editor