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DARTMOUTH FOOTBALL
by David Shribman ’76
It was a moment, and a celebration, for the ages. On the turf of ancient Memorial Field, a group of Dartmouth players were gathered, championship hats on their sweaty heads, a championship banner being held aloft. The men of November triumph were marking Dartmouth’s 18th Ivy League championship, the most of any college in the conference, but more than anything they were marking the return of the gridiron world order, with Dartmouth--the smallest and yet the most accomplished of the Ivy football powers--atop the standings of the nation’s most prestigious academic institutions. ‘’Back on Top,’’ ran the banner headline in the local paper, and the sentiment was shared among Dartmouth alumni coast to coast and across the globe. The road back to gridiron supremacy was hard, much like the five-play goal-line stand-itself a moment for the ages--that the 2015 team fashioned in its latest confrontation with Harvard. That road back was traversed in a decade of determination and diligence, and above all in the heart and mind of one man for whom this was a personal crusade, for coach Buddy Teevens believed when, through years of travail and even a mortifying 0-10 season, many others on Hanover Plain ceased to believe. He had a dream, and he persuaded others--new recruits, academic administrators, athletic donors, a skeptical press, even his Ivy opponents, one of whom admitted after a dramatic defeat that his wife considered Teevens her favorite rival coach--to share it. DARTMOUTH FOOTBALL | 3
Fans watched the 2015 championship season from the newly renovated West Stands at Memorial Field (above).
“The college that came a mere 38 seconds from an undefeated season in 2015 and that has dominated Ivy League football play since the inception of formal league play six decades ago is a dominant factor again. History repeated itself, this time with feeling.” The results were stunning, and the accolades, regional and national, affirmed their power. Teevens was named New England Coach of the Year and Dalyn Williams, the gifted and versatile quarterback who already possessed a fistful of offensive records, was awarded the George Bulger Lowe Award as the top offensive player in the region--a designation known as the New England Heisman Trophy and one of the oldest football awards in the country. When the All-Ivy League defensive team was selected, more than half the members wore the Dartmouth green. And in the weeks following the dramatic comeback victory against Princeton, more of the sport’s glittering prizes came to Dartmouth and its gilded gridironers. They were almost an anti-climax. Because now-Dartmouth back on top and the natural order restored in the Ivy League--better, sunnier days were here, and looked to here for some time. With a 9-1 record in 2015 and with 23 victories against only 7 defeats in a three-year period, the message coursed through the East: The college that came a mere 38 seconds from an undefeated season in 2015 and that has dominated Ivy League football play since the inception of formal league play six decades ago is a dominant factor again. History repeated itself, this time with feeling. But the history itself was dazzling.
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There was a coach who, in his 40s, left Hanover and enlisted as a private to fight in World War I, and another one, perhaps the greatest of his era, who was recruited off the turf of Memorial Field to coach at West Point as World War II approached. There was a player whose nickname was Air Mail and another who went by Special Delivery. There was a game decided, and then undecided, by a Fifth Down, one involving a Twelfth Man, and another played in a hurricane— three of the most fabled college matches of all time. There was a confrontation, within the memory of people who walk Dartmouth’s sylvan campus today, between two nationally ranked Ivy teams, played in front of more than 60,000 people. There were five consecutive Ivy League championships, but arguably none as sweet as the one in 2015.
Will McNamara ’16 was a finalist for the 2015 Bushnell Cup, given annually to the top offensive and defensive players in the Ivy League. He was also named All-New England and a unanimous All-Ivy League First Team selection for the second time in his career
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Buddy Teevens Named Regional Coach of the Year by Two Organizations HANOVER, N.H. — After leading the Dartmouth football team to a 9-1 overall record, a top-25 national ranking and a share of the Ivy League crown for the first time in 19 years, Robert L. Blackman Head Football Coach Buddy Teevens was named the Region I FCS Coach of the Year by the American Football Coaches Association (AFCA). In addition, the New England Football Writers’ Association (NEFWA) has pegged Teevens as its New England Coach of the Year as well. Teevens is the first Dartmouth football coach to earn the AFCA award since Joe Yukica in 1978, and the fourth overall, joining Bob Blackman (1962, ’65, ’69, ’70), Jake Crouthamel (1973) and Yukica, giving the Big Green a total of seven since the award was instituted following the 1960 season. Only Yale coaches have received the honor more often (8) within the Ivy League. The NEFWA, which gives its award to the top Division I coach (FCS and FBS), has also bestowed its honor on the Big Green head coach seven times — Blackman in 1958, ’62 and ’65, Crouthamel in 1973, Yukica in 1978 and John Lyons in 1996, the last time Dartmouth had finished atop the Ivy League standings. This is the third time Teevens has guided the Big Green to an Ivy League crown, but first since 1991 during his inaugural stint at the helm of the program. He took the head coaching job at Tulane after that season and had a stint leading the Stanford Cardinal before returning to Hanover in 2005. Led by a smothering defense that led the FCS in fewest points allowed (10.1) and ranked among the top five in rushing yards allowed and total yards allowed, Dartmouth won its first five games by an average margin of 28.6 points to climb into the national rankings for the first time since the end of the 1996 campaign. After defeating Columbia to improve to 6-0, the Big Green traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to try and snap the 20-game win streak owned by two-time defending champion and 15th-ranked Harvard, only to lose by a point in the final minute of play for their lone setback of the season. Dartmouth rebounded to win its next two contests, while Harvard suffered a loss to Penn — a team the Green defeated earlier in the year handily, 41-20 — putting those three teams in a tie atop the standings. All three won their season finales to give the Ivy League its first three-way tie for the title since 1982 and just the fourth ever. The Big Green have been knocking on the door of another Ivy League crown for the past five season, finishing second or third every year since 2011. Two years ago, the only thing that kept Dartmouth from forcing another three-way tie was merely the longest game in conference history, a four-overtime loss at Penn. Last year, the Green finished 6-1 in Ivy play as they did this year, but Harvard edged them out for the crown by taking a 23-12 victory over Dartmouth in Hanover. Over the past two and a half seasons, the Big Green are 21-4 with all four losses coming against ranked opponents. - DartmouthSports.com
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LEMSON, ALABAMA, IOWA AND
beat the leading teams of their time (especially the University of Chicago Notre Dame may be the marquee names of and Cornell in the 1920s, the class of college football today, but before the Tigers, the the decade) and beat back expectations that a country college far from major Crimson Tide, the Hawkeyes and the Fighting media outlets could attract top talent the television age (the Bob Blackman Irish, a great tradition—one of America’s in teams of the 1960s and early 1970s). greatest sporting traditions, more than a Dartmouth became the destination for members of the leading football famcentury and a third old—was planted in the ilies of the nation (which is why Dave Shula, son of Dolphins coach Don Shucold, hard soil of New Hampshire. la, was a favorite receiver of quarterback It isn’t only because Dartmouth is uni- tions, and many professional athletes, Jeff Kemp, son of Bills signal-caller, versally recognized as possessing one of including one who is in both the hockey Buffalo congressman and Republican the premier football programs in New and football halls of fame, one who is in 1996 vice-presidential nominee Jack England, or because the teams in green both the college and pro football halls Kemp). It cultivated a reputation for have won Eastern football laurels and a of fame, one who was both the NFL and athletic excellence married to academic coveted national championship, or be- Sports Illustrated Man of the Year, and excellence, begun when the captain of cause Dartmouth’s rivalries with Har- one who during his career held the re- the 1925 national-championship team vard, Yale, Princeton, and Holy Cross cord for the most field goals of all time became a Rhodes Scholar and solidified when Willie Boare among the oldgan, a mainstay on est, sturdiest and the field on Saturmost storied in the day afternoons and nation. It’s because, in the library Satat Hanover, footurday nights, first ball is part of the turned down the collegiate experiNaval Academy ence, at the center for Dartmouth and of autumnal rites then turned down that draw to the the Baltimore Upper Valley thouColts for Oxford as sands of alumni a Rhodes Scholar. and friends of the Part of it, of College, full of ritcourse, is the tradiuals that include tion. Football playtailgates and tubs ers come to Dartof pulled pork, mouth to compete whiskey sours and in a top-flight prowistful memories gram where their of glorious moTHE 1925 NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP academic burdens ments too numerPrevailing strategy said that a team scored upon can choose to kick off. Cornell kept kicking off. Swede Oberlander threw six touchdown passes. Dartmouth won, 62-13. are as great as their ous to count. A week later, Dartmouth traveled west and beat Chicago, 33-7, to claim the national athletic challeng Dartmouth competed in foot- championship with a perfect 8-0-0 record. The Green scored 340 points, allowd only 29, es and where their and had five shutouts. teammates are ball as early as 1881, played (and won) the inaugu- while winning the NFL Players Associ- likely to be corporate chieftains (Jeff ral game at Harvard Stadium in 1903, ation’s Byron ``Whizzer’’ White Award Immelt, the current head of General competed in intersectional games as for humanitarian community activi- Electric, undergraduate winner of the early as 1920, was the nation’s top team ties—an award, it is worth noting, won Earl Hamilton Varsity Football Award in 1925, joined the formal Ivy League by two Dartmouth men in a period of for friendship and character) or memin 1954, and dominated its play for de- eight years and by no other alumni of bers of the president’s cabinet (Hank Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury in cades. Over the years it has had dozens any other Ivy League institution. of All-Americas, scores of All-Ivy selec- Along the way Dartmouth elevens the George W. Bush administration).
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DARTMOUTH’S ASA S. BUSHNELL CUP WINNERS IVY LEAGUE PLAYER OF THE YEAR
1970 Jim Chasey // QB 1978 Buddy Teevens // QB
Early football at Dartmouth was played on the College Green (top) before the nowfamiliar Memorial Field, pictured here in 1923, began to play host to the team.
1990 Shon Page // TB 1991 Al Rosier // TB 1992 Jay Fiedler // QB 2010 Nick Schwieger // RB
But part of it, too, is the setting: a Romanesque-style football stadium at the edge of a classic New England college campus overlooking a New Hampshire hill that is aflame in brilliant fall colors for much of the football season. There may be bigger stadiums in the country but there is none—none--in a more stunning setting. ND THEN THERE are the numbers: Winning streaks in four decades that reached 15 games. Two Lambert Trophies, emblematic of football supremacy in the East. Nine undefeated seasons. Those 18 Ivy League championships. One game (in the first season, against Amherst) called off after the first half because the snow and slush made movement all but impossible on Thanksgiving Day 1881. One season, in 1970, in which Dartmouth sculpted six shutouts and surrendered only 42
points all season. And best of all: 45 victories against Harvard, one by a score of 48-0. For Dartmouth is the place where Jay Fielder passed (on the way to the Miami Dolphins), where Don MacKinnon centered (on the way to the Boston Patriots), where Reggie Williams tackled (on the way to the Cincinnati Bengals and two Super Bowls), and where Nick Lowery kicked (on the way to the Kansas City Chiefs, the New England Patriots, the New York Jets and two All-Pro selections). It is also the place where the names ``Jake’’ and ``Buddy’’ need no surname and, moreover, need no introduction, for the former, now retired, prowls the sidelines during practice many days each fall, watching the latter—his quarterback and protégé— who commands the Big Green on the sidelines on game days. Not that things started out so smartly at Dartmouth. The first goalposts, rudimentary structures, went up on campus in 1876 but didn’t last long, being torn down on the College Green before commenceDARTMOUTH FOOTBALL | 9
Donald McKinnon ’63 and Bob Blackman on the sidelines. McKinnon was a First Team All-America as a senior on the 1962 undefeated team. He would go on to play two seasons with the Boston Patriots of the AFL.
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ment the next spring. A ragtag group of Dartmouth students assembled, way back in 1882, to play a more organized bunch from Harvard, and the boys from Hanover did not score. The boys from Harvard did; in fact they racked up 53 points. It was not a felicitous occasion. ``If there is any game that Dartmouth can play better than football,’’ The Dartmouth editorialized, ``it would be well to encourage it.’’ This was not the last time an editorial in the college paper was best ignored, though the notion, only two years later, of inviting the very finest team in the country up to Hanover Plain might not have been the brightest idea of the era. Yale won that contest, 113-0 (eventually outscoring Dartmouth 308-0 in the two teams’
first eight contests). The Eli did not return to Hanover for another 87 years. Before long the Dartmouths got the knack of the autumnal game. By 1896 the Green had its first All-America (Walter McCornack) and by the first years of the 20th century, Dartmouth had assembled something of a powerhouse on the gridiron. The 1903 team defeated Harvard at the opening of its famous new poured-concrete stadium, had a 9-1 record, shut out eight of its 10 opponents and scored more than 10 times as many points as its opponents. Four of its players were selected as All-Americas. By 1901, Dartmouth had its first black player, Matthew Bullock, a son of illiterate parents both born as slaves and a man who would later
There were years when it seemed it was easier to be admitted, early decision, to Dartmouth than to score a couple of Section Six tickets for the Princeton game.
graduate from Harvard Law School. He was an end and honorable mention All-America. ROM THAT PERIOD ON, football was well-established at Hanover. And well-loved as well. Football weekends at Dartmouth were the envy of the women of the Seven Sisters colleges—many top colleges were single-sex institutions until the late 1960s and early 1970s—and those weekends were the occasions around which Dartmouth men planned their fall schedules. Parking places in the tiny college town were at a premium, and so were seats at Memorial Field, where the phrase ``Section Six’’—the center spectator section on the west side of the stadium—held a special allure. There were years when it seemed it was easier to be admitted, early decision, to Dartmouth than to score a couple of Section Six tickets for the Princeton game, which in those
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days was always played in autumn splendor on the third Saturday of the season when at home and on the last Saturday of the season when away. Of course, through two-thirds of the 20th century the Harvard, Yale and Princeton games were always played in Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey, respectively, though Dartmouth did tangle with Notre Dame at Fenway Park in Boston. The score of the two games against the Irish are best omitted here, but the confrontations with the Crimson, Eli, and Tigers were always spirited, the crowds always large, and the rituals always poignant. Many smiles and many tears mingled with the Harvard cheers, as the backs went tearing by. There was a time when that phrase was known far beyond Hanover, and a time when the song by that title, though never revered as much as Richard Hovey’s uplifting Alma Mater, nonetheless was included, along with
``Hail to the Victors Valiant’’ of Michigan and the Notre Dame Fight Song, in every medley of football fight songs and every anthology of college anthems. And yet, from this vantage point, it is now clear that that there was no singular Golden Age of Dartmouth Football because the expression ``golden age’’ is not singular when it comes to Dartmouth football. In the 1920s, which began with a transcontinental trip to the University of Washington, Dartmouth emerged as one of the premier powers of the sport, with the quarterback and defensive back Eddie ``Death’’ Dooley—later a newspaper writer and congressman, two professions of dubious repute— emerging as one of Dartmouth’s great athletes of the era. Three of the premier players of the sport in this period wore Dartmouth green: Al Marsters, a gifted broken-field runner and passer known as Special Delivery; Bill Morton, who
ran and passed for 25 touchdowns in three seasons and, continuing the postal theme, was known as Air Mail; and Bob MacLeod, who averaged nearly six yards per carry and was the central figure in a 7-0-2 season that won Dartmouth a 1937 Rose Bowl invitation that the College turned down, post-season games being regarded as a distraction from Dartmouth’s academic mission. As mid-century approached, two legendary coaches—Earl ``Red’’ Blaik and DeOrmond ``Tuss’’ McLaughry, one a martinet, the other a whispery gentleman—personified Dartmouth in the national press. Blaik’s teams were 29-5-3 in four seasons, including a remarkable stretch of 22 games when Dartmouth was not defeated. McLaughry presided over victories against Miami (Ohio), Syracuse and an Army team coached by Blaik himself.
DARTMOUTH IN THE COLLEGE FOOTBALL HALL OF FAME Eight Dartmouth College players, including Reggie Williams ’76 (63), are enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame, including one who is also a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. Additionally, five Dartmouth coaches or administrators are in the College Hall of Fame.
PLAYERS
COACHES & ADMINISTRATORS
Clarence (Fat) Spears 1917 All-America guard in 1914-15 and Dartmouth’s head coach from 1917-20
Edward K. Hall 1892 ( charter inductee) An end at Dartmouth in 1890-91.He served as successor to Walter Camp as chairman of the Football Rules Committee from 1911-32
Edward Healey 1918 A tackle at Dartmouth before and after World War I. He was the first player in pro football history to be sold, to the Chicago Bears for whom he played from 1922-27. Also in the Pro Football Hall of Fame
Frank W. Cavanaugh 1899 Coached Dartmouth to a 42-9-3 record from 1911-16 D. O. (Tuss) McLaughry Dartmouth’s coach from 1941-42 and from 1945-54 (44-58-3)
Andrew (Swede) Oberlander 1926 All-America halfback and passer who led Dartmouth to the national championship in 1925
Earl H. Blaik Dartmouth’s coach from 1934-40 (45-15-4)
Myles Lane 1928 Dartmouth’s all-time scoring leader (307 points from 1925-27). Lane is also enshrined in the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame William (Air Mail) Morton 1932 All-America quarterback in 1931. Also a twotime All-America in hockey Robert MacLeod 1939 All-America halfback in 1938 Murry Bowden 1971 All-America defensive back in 1970
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Robert L. Blackman Had three undefeated teams as Dartmouth’s coach from 1955-70 (104-37-3) Reggie Williams 1976 All-America linebacker in 1975
“Being selected for the College Football Hall of Fame is a great honor and a culminating moment for me, for Dartmouth College, and for the Ivy League.” - Reggie Williams ’76
Jay Fiedler ’94 is considered by many to be the best quarterback in Dartmouth history. After setting numerous passing records, Fiedler went on to a nine-year NFL career with five teams.
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For the first time in program history, Dartmouth played a night game in 2011 with the installation of lights at Memorial Field. The team continues to play at least one game under the lights every season. 14 | DARTMOUTH FOOTBALL
10-0!
The 1996 team produced Dartmouth’s only unblemished10-win record and is the most recent of the program’s 17 Ancient Eight titles. The season was capped with a 24-0 win at Princeton to capture the league crown.
HEN CAME FORMAL Ivy League play and the arrival of Bob Blackman, a football magus who coached for 16 years at Dartmouth, winning or sharing seven Ivy championships, three times being named eastern coach of the year and once national coach of the year. Everything about Blackman and his Dartmouth teams was impressive, perhaps even a bit excessive; they practiced at Yankee Stadium, they played with grace and power, and they were coached by a man who won fawning spreads in Sports Illustrated and LOOK (one of the leading popular periodicals of the time, the rival of LIFE) and was inducted in the College Football Hall of Fame. Perhaps the most memorable game in Dart-
mouth history, along with a 33-7 victory in 1925 against the University of Chicago (the reigning Big Ten champions), was the season-ending 1965 game that pitted Princeton, with a 17-game win streak, against Dartmouth, undefeated in its first eight games that year. A crowd of 45,725 mobbed Palmer Stadium to witness Dartmouth’s 28-14 victory to cinch the Ivy championship
and the Lambert Trophy. With a record of 104-37-2 after his undefeated 1970 team, Blackman departed for Illinois and then to Cornell. He was unable to replicate his Hanover success either at Urbana-Champaign or at Ithaca. Six of Blackman’s assistants became head coaches, one of them his successor, the redoubtable Jake Crouthamel, a towering figure on campus even as
Everything about Blackman and his Dartmouth teams was impressive, perhaps even a bit excessive; they practiced at Yankee Stadium, they played with grace and power, and they were coached by a man who won fawning spreads in Sports Illustrated and LOOK and was inducted in the College Football Hall of Fame. DARTMOUTH FOOTBALL | 15
undergraduate, when he started 27 consecutive games in the backfield and held a Dartmouth rushing record that stood until one of his own players, Rick Klupchak, broke it in 1973. His first three teams won the Ivy championship, stopping Cornell’s powerful Ed Marinaro in the process, and during his reign more Dartmouth gridironers were selected to All-Ivy teams than those of any other college. Crouthamel later became athletic director at Syracuse, presiding over the construction of the Carrier Dome and becoming one of the pillars of the Big East, a dominant basketball conference for a quarter of a century. Crouthamel was followed by Joe Yukica, a onetime Blackman assistant and coach at Boston College; Buddy Teevens, a onetime Dartmouth quarterback and co-captain named the Ivy League’s outstanding player in 1978; and John Lyons, who presided over Dartmouth’s only 10-0-0 season, in 1996.
OTHING LASTS FOREVER, and neither did Dartmouth’s dominance of Ivy League football. Strong challenges came within the Ivies from Penn and Harvard, and from outside the Ivies, where some of the rivals that once had been pushovers showed new strength, in part because they began offering athletic scholarships that Ivy colleges such as Dartmouth do not countenance. ``The bottom,’’ as Lincoln said in the Union’s darkest days of the Civil War, was ‘’out of the tub.’’ Even so, there were in this period remarkable individual performances from, among many others, defensive players Lloyd Lee and Zach Walz and quarterback Brian Mann, and there was a remarkable catch by Andrew Hall of a 38-yard Charlie Rittgers pass that sealed Dartmouth’s 30-16 upset win at Cambridge in 2003. But overall Dart-
mouth endured a difficult fallow period until the return to Hanover of onetime coach Buddy Teevens, who had been head coach at Tulane and Stanford, resumed that position at his alma mater in 2005, and is on a trajectory to becoming Dartmouth’s longest-serving coach. The road back was hard, with only nine wins in Teevens’s first five years back at Dartmouth. But with grit and graciousness, Teevens battled back, melding a strong sense of the College’s heritage—his teams always gathered near the stands and sang the College song after games, win or lose—along with a strong sense of purpose and strong personal performances from offensive players such as Nick Schwieger (the all-time Green rushing leader who was named the Ivy League’s outstanding player in 2010), Dominick Pierre (second all-time rusher and first-team AllIvy running back in 2013) and Dalyn Williams (a dominant and much-laureled star from the moment he debuted as a freshman until the 12-yard touch-
Cody Fulleton ’16 (left), Coach Buddy Teevens (middle) and Vernon Harris ’16 (right) stand together to sing the alma mater following Dartmouth’s 41-10 victory at Princeton to close out the 2014 season.
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PHOTO COURTESY OF DARTMOUTH PUBLIC AFFAIRS
Garrett Waggoner ’13 secured a 28-24 Dartmouth victory over Princeton with this interception in the final game of the 2013 season, denying the Tigers a perfect Ivy season and an outright league title.
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So once again the future seems bright at Memorial Field, with its new home stands inside its iconic brick walls. The crawling tendrils of ivy will take some time to grow back, but the annual presence of a large contingent of upperclassmen proves that the football experience is flourishing again at Dartmouth. down pass to Kyle Bramble in his final drive against Princeton in 2015 to clinch a share of the Ivy crown in the last 24 seconds of the season, and of his Dartmouth career). Together they provided a strong foundation for a dramatic turnaround in gridiron fortunes, with Dartmouth restoring its tradition of winning records, finishing second among the Ivies twice before emerging as conference champions. So once again the future seems bright at Memorial Field, with its new home stands inside its iconic brick walls. The
crawling tendrils of ivy will take some time to grow back, but the annual presence of a large contingent of upperclassmen proves that the football experience is flourishing again at Dartmouth. Indeed, the fresh new banner hanging on the old field is proof that the program that has won the most Ivy championships since formal league play began is back, and back on top. Not only in the past and in song do those backs go tearing by, or bring glory to Dartmouth.
David Shribman ’76 is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and is author or editor of four books on Dartmouth history, including one on Dartmouth football. He served on Dartmouth’s Board of Trustees for a decade. His Pulitzer Prize was not for football writing.
Graphics and layout by Pat Salvas; Photos by Mark Washburn, John and Matt Risley, Art Petrosemelo and Dartmouth Athletics Communications archives.
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