Former Tulane Football Coach To Receive National Football Foundation Honor
Former Tulane head football coach Buddy Teevens will be honored later this year with the National Football Foundation’s outstanding contribution to amateur football award.
Teevens will be recognized posthumously during the NFF’s annual award dinner in Las Vegas on Dec. 10.
He died last year from injuries suffered after he was struck by a vehicle while riding his bicycle in St. Augustine, Fla.
He is best known for his time at Dartmouth, first as a quarterback from 1975-78, leading the Big Green to an Ivy League title in 1978. He was the program’s head coach twice — 1987-91 and 2005-22. He was 117–101–2 at his alma mater, as he led the Big Green to five Ivy League crowns. Earlier this year, Dartmouth re-named its football stadium Buddy Teevens Stadium at Memorial Field.
After leading the Big Green to back-to-back Ivy titles in 1990-91, he took the leap into the FBS (then Division I-A) ranks with Tulane. He led the Green Wave for five seasons, four as an independent and one as a member of Conference USA. His success at Dartmouth didn’t translate to Tulane.
He went just 11-45 and was let go after the 1996 season. He did claim one landmark win — a 31-17 victory over No. 2 Alabama in 1993, the year after the Crimson Tide won the national title under Gene Stallings.
Perhaps his best contribution was that he recruited many of the players that would make up Tulane’s 1998 squad, which would go undefeated under coach Tommy Bowden and finish No. 7 in the final AP Top 25.
Teevens, who served as an offensive coordinator at Boston University, Illinois and Florida, helped New Orleans legends Archie, Peyton and Eli Manning build the Manning Passing Academy. He served as an associate director for 25 years.
"When we first approached him about the Manning Passing Academy in 1996 to help improve the game for high school players, he simply said, 'Let's do it,' and he just became a rock for the event over the years,” Archie Manning said in a release. “I can't think of a more fitting tribute to his memory than to add his name to the esteemed list of NFF Outstanding Contribution to Amateur Football recipients."
Teevens became nationally known for his methods to protect players from concussions, instituting a ban on tackling during practice starting in 2010. He continued to pioneer safety innovations in 2015 when collaborated with students at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering to develop the Mobile Virtual Player (MVP), the world's first robotic tackling dummy.
He also hired six female coaches to work for him at Dartmouth, including Callie Brownson, who became the first full-time female Division I coach in college football history. She later joined the Cleveland Browns and became the first female coach to lead a position group during a game.
He had a career record of 151-178-2 as a head coach at Maine, Dartmouth, Tulane and Stanford.
