Andrew Luck and Buddy Teevens

You have heard of Andrew Luck.  You probably not have heard of Buddy Teevens.  Both now are former quarterbacks.  One is figuring out what to do next; the other is an innovative FCS football coach.  So you might be asking the question -- who cares?  Or, if you are the least bit curious, you might ask, why am I linking the two men?

Luck's story is well-known.  He is the son of a star college QB (a Rhodes Scholarship semi-finalist, if I recall correctly -- the dad, that is) and a former star at Stanford (the son, that is), the QB who was set to become a generational quarterback and pick up the mantle where Colts' all-timer Peyton Manning left off and perhaps win a few Super Bowls.  That was how the script was supposed to have gone down.  Instead, Luck got pretty banged up, missed a lot of games, and, a week ago, decided to hang up his cleats.  He just couldn't get healthy, and the toll on his mental health was rough.  Outside of some criticism about the timing (those who felt he left his team in a bind and could have retired before the draft and someone who suggested that he conspired with the Colts' owner to retire after season ticket holders' commitments were locked in and, yes, some who suggested he just was not tough enough), his decision to retire was met with support and empathy.  Luck wanted to walk away while he could still walk and have feeling in all of his extremities and lower back.  And he has skills to do other things.

Teevens was a quarterback for Dartmouth in the late 1970's, and a pretty good one at that.  He then coached in various places and stepped up to what is now FBS at Tulane a while back, although he was not successful.  He then returned to Dartmouth and has been the most successful coach over the past decade or so, which is an outstanding accomplishment when you have the recent tradition of Penn, the longstanding excellence of Tim Murphy at Harvard and the recent juggernauts that Bob Surace has built at Princeton.  What makes Teevens successful now is that he is an innovator.  While the Ivies have eliminated almost all hitting in practices, Teevens has eliminated all of it and has employed robotic tackling dummies and virtual reality as substitutes for preparation. His motivation?  "If we don't change the way we coach, we will not have a game to coach," he told a reporter from ESPN the Magazine. 

Now, before you anoint Teevens as the innovator on the topic of hitting in practice, he wasn't.  That title belongs to the all-time winningest football coach in Division III history, the late John Gagliardi of St. John's College in Minnesota, who won several national titles and over 400 games.  I could not find a link to a Sports Illustrated article from decades ago touting the magic of Coach Gagliardi, but I do recall a quote from him on hitting.  His teams did not hit in practice.  Ever.  His thought -- "Our players have mothers.  Who wants to see their kids get hit more than they have to?"  Teevens, ergo, is an extension of Gagliardi, and now he is taking Gagliardi's thinking in this area to another level.  As is former Princeton linebacker Glenn Tilley, the CEO of Defend Your Head, which is working on new technology to protect football players for when they do have to hit and get hit.

So what is the link between Luck and Teevens?  Perhaps it is a tenuous one at best.  There's an adage that innovation does not always start with the biggest companies because they are just so big and it is hard to innovate at the biggest places and that they are risk averse to very conservative and that the smaller companies can take bigger risks because the risk of getting fired is smaller or the magnitude of an error with the innovation is a lot smaller.  In other words, try a big innovation at IBM and fail and earnings tank, people get laid off and the company is a mess; try an innovation at MBI in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, with 25 employees, and well, you might be onto something that all of the big companies will want.  Why?  Because you've tested it in a smaller environment and proved the commercial concept.  At least it's a thought.  Teevens has more room to innovate; there is less pressure to win in the Ivies than the SEC.

So Teevens has innovated a lot about hitting and preserving players' health and sanity.  Perhaps that thinking moves from the hallowed halls of the Ivies to FBS schools, places where the elite players get their training for the pro ranks.  And then perhaps it moves to the NFL.  And then perhaps careers last longer and injuries -- physical and emotional -- are less devastating.  And perhaps a guy like Andrew Luck does not get as beat up and can play for longer, as well as hundreds of others who plays with awful injuries for fear of losing their place on their team and their livelihoods, especially when careers are so short and when for some of the players, well, their best earning days could be right now.

Teevens is onto something big.  The big boys should take notice -- both at the FBS level and the NFL.  Teevens' words are foretelling and could be haunting if not heeded -- "If we do not change the way we coach, we will not have a game to coach."

He could help save football as we know it.

For the players.

For the fans.

And from itself.