Future of sport is being led by Ivy League
Many of today’s safety steps have roots in league.
The earliest football game between two eventual members of the Ivy League took place when Columbia played Yale in 1872. Dartmouth’s football team had its first intercollegiate game in 1881, several years before the sport was formally introduced at Ohio State and Alabama.
This is supposedly the league of football the way it once was. But today, in this northern outpost of the Ancient Eight, a program soaked in football’s past is trying to drag the sport into the future.
In 2010, the Big Green eliminated tackling in all practices — even preseason camp and spring ball. Coach Buddy Teevens likes to say that a freshman will play four years without being tackled by another Dartmouth player. The NCAA has since recommended dialing back contact significantly in practice.
A couple of years ago, Dartmouth began using moving robots as tackling dummies. The tall, remote-controlled cones of padding whir along Memorial Field’s turf like R2-D2. Now, more than half of NFL teams, several dozen college programs and around 100 high schools have these mobile virtual players, or MVPs, Teevens said.
The innovations, Teevens said, were geared toward making football safer, minimizing the head trauma that scientists have linked to degenerative brain disorders like chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Teevens, 62, casts his policies as enlightened self-interest. Practices with less contact mean fewer injuries and fresher players. Never tackling teammates means more, and more precise, work on tackling technique. He estimates that Dartmouth has cut its missed tackles by two-thirds. (The MVPs also represent another kind of enlightened self-interest: They were Teevens’ idea, and he is chairman of the company that manufactures them.)
Beyond wanting to win, Teevens is motivated by a fear that an irreplaceable sport could die.
“I think it’s too valuable a game to say, ‘Oh, we’ll do something else,’ ” he said. “But I also look at the data and the medical side of it. Something has to be done.”
The bet is that the sport can be salvaged by incremental changes that might help save players like Owen Thomas, a University of Pennsylvania team captain who hanged himself in 2010 and was then found to have CTE. “He’s trying to make his players safer in a way that hasn’t hurt them on the field,” said Chris Nowinski, a founder of the Concussion Legacy Foundation. “He’s proving we can change football, make it safer, work within the system.”
“Will it save the game of football?” Teevens said. “I don’t know. But I think it’s a step in the right direction.”
Every level of football has recently implemented measures to protect players’ brains. Youth leagues have adopted flag football. Something called “modified tackle” has infiltrated high schools. College football instituted severe penalties for “targeting.” The NFL limited contact for in-season practices. Many college teams have elected to reduce contact in in-season practices, too.
But the Ivy League — which besides Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn and Yale features Brown, Cornell and Princeton — is on another plane, Nowinski said. In 2016, after a unanimous coaches’ vote, it banned tackling during in-season practices, although teams other than Dartmouth still tackle in the spring or the preseason. The same year, the Ivy League altered kickoff rules to discourage returns. That reduced the concussion rate on football’s most dangerous play fivefold, according to a new medical study.
During the same period, the league emerged as among the best at its level. Its out-of-conference record this season and last, 36-12, was tops in the Football Championship Subdivision.
To be clear, Ivy League players still tackle one another in games. Teevens drew a parallel to the time that President Theodore Roosevelt convened a White House meeting with college sports officials, including Harvard’s and Princeton’s coaches, to address football safety. One solution they came up with was allowing the forward pass.
“Here we are, the petri dish,” he said, “doing some stuff that maybe other people will feed off of.”
Teevens tinkers with tackling technique the way a French chef perfects his Hollandaise sauce. He and his staff broke down every tackle from the 2016 Ivy League season — 3,700 in all — to determine ideal style. He suggested the idea for the MVPs to a college classmate now at Dartmouth’s engineering school with the purpose of simulating a moving target without using a player.
The next frontier is blocking. Eliminating blocking would not so much reform football as fundamentally alter it. Teevens does not want to be the cause of lasting brain trauma, but he does not want football to end, either.
He has been breaking down more tape. What if players learned to block lower, minimizing head-tohead contact?
“That’s the thing I’m working on right now,” he said.