Ex-Tulane coach Teevens a trendsetter that NFL may follow

Former Tulane coach Buddy Teevens’ 16th season back at his alma mater, Dartmouth, has been delayed until the spring because of the coronavirus. His teaching methods, however, could be in the forefront over the next few weeks, and not on the college level.

Teevens eliminated live tackling in practice a decade ago and live blocking a couple of years later. So when NFL teams can only have 14 padded practices and no preseason games leading into their season openers, if anyone can relate to the changes, it’s him.

“I think the players will find that they’re fresher,” Teevens told Albert Breer of SI.com for the site’s Monday Morning Quarterback column. “And my sense, if you’re forced to go through something like this, when you come out the other side, you’re probably going to do more of what you had just done and realize that maybe you don’t have to do it the other way.”

Clearly, it’s working. Teevens’ Dartmouth teams went 70-30 over the last decade. Since 2014, the Big Green is 47-13 with a pair of Ivy League titles.

Teevens – who still comes back to Louisiana every year in his leadership role for the Manning Passing Academy – said Dartmouth’s injury rate and concussion rate is the lowest in the Ivy League “by far.”

It’s not that Teevens’ teams haven’t practiced hitting – they just haven’t done it on other bodies. One very important way has been through the development of the Mobile Virtual Player (MVP) robotic tackling dummy, a joint product between Teevens and a group of engineers and athletes from Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering.

“I’d venture to say we tackle more than anybody in the country,” Teevens told Breer. “We just don’t tackle each other.”

The lower injury and concussion rates have served as an advantage in recruiting. It will be interesting to see how much more the NFL takes notice leading into a new-look training camp.

“(Recruits) look at the success and the championships and so forth, then, ‘Well, wow, I want to be a doctor and I want to be a linebacker, and they get guys doing that,’ ” Teevens said in the SI.com story. “And it’s healthy. So that’s helped us immensely.

“People nationally are starting to move in that direction. And I think the pace can be picked up. And certainly, if the NFL is going to limit the length of preseason and amount of contact in preseason, it’s going to be reflected in the drop in injury in preseason, and healthier guys going on into the regular season. Then I think people will take note.”