Hanover
The Big Green staged the first of its 12 spring practice sessions Tuesday on Memorial Field and the top question, naturally, is who’s going to succeed Williams and his record-setting ways. The answer is that freshman Bruce Dixon and sophomore Jack Heneghan will each get a crack at the job, but there are new faces in new places all over the field.
“The details were lacking today,” said head coach Buddy Teevens, whose program captured a share of its first Ivy League title since 1996 last fall. “We had great energy and we’ve got good depth with a bunch of people who can contribute and play, but we had too many balls on the ground, we jumped offsides and we had bad snaps.
“They’re smart kids and athletically, I’m happy. Four years ago, we had kids who no one had ever heard of and they ended up playing pretty well.”
Teevens said Dixon and Heneghan are splitting repetitions with the first-team offense. The former completed 2-of-3 passes for 21 yards while seeing action in three games and was the backup the second half of the season. The latter lost that job after a dismal relief showing at Pennsylvania and completed 5-of-10 passes for 39 yards during two contests.
“We’ll see who’s going to be the guy who masters what we’re doing,” Teevens said. “We had to shuffle the offensive line around a bit last year due to injury and that affected us a little bit. We think we should be potentially stronger there … and maybe we can protect (the quarterback) a little bit more than we did with Dalyn last year.”
Teevens was unaware that the NCAA last week deregulated electronic communications with high school prospects in several sports, including football. It’s been that way for basketball since 2012, but Ohio State gridiron boss Urban Meyer called the move “the most ignorant thing I’ve ever heard in my life” while discussing it with ESPN.com, and his Dartmouth counterpart isn’t a big fan, either. Phone texting is projected to be the biggest issue.
“You’ll have some poor kid who’s a top 10 (recruit) in the country and it’s going to be constant harassment,” Teevens said. “Kids will be changing their numbers. We’ll still do what we do. We’ll obviously text now that we can, but I’ve always tried to maintain an element of reason and sanity.
“I wish it hadn’t gone forward, but that’s the NCAA. They’re going to have to revisit it.”
The Ivy League generated immense amounts of positive publicity for itself in February when its football coaches voted to eliminate live, practice contact during the season. Teevens was the one who suggested the move, and he said it met with no resistance. Dartmouth players have not tackled each other since the fall of 2012.
“It was basically a five-minute conversation, and I just said it would be a nice thing from a league standpoint to lead the country,” Teevens said. “The guys who play against us have seen the results. There was no dissension.”
Teevens said what’s been widely misunderstood, however, is that Dartmouth will remain the only Ivy team to not tackle during any of its practices, year-round. Other league teams will continue to tackle during their spring and preseason practices in August and September. The coach said he held off pushing for a league-wide, year-round ban because he felt it was asking too much, too fast.
“I thought that was too radical and guys would buck at that,” he said. “We’re taking baby steps and it’s a big concession because no one else in the country is willing to do it yet. I think … eventually, more people will do what we’re doing.”
Harry Sheehy, Dartmouth’s athletic director, said during a radio appearance on WTSL last week that he thought the door might finally have been cracked open for talk about Ivy League football teams participating in the national Football Championship Subdivision playoffs. The circuit recently became the last in the country to add end-of-the-season tournaments to decide which men’s and women’s basketball teams receive the league’s automatic NCAA tournament bid.
Football is the last remaining sport in which the Ivies don’t participate in the national playoffs, and Teevens said he doesn’t see that changing anytime soon.
“There’s an initiative with football (players) in the Ivy League who are trying to push it at the (league) presidential level and that’s probably the best way to do it,” he said. “They have our full support, but we’ve worn ourselves out as coaches, asking for it.”
Notes: Two updated models of the Mobile Virtual Player robotic tackling dummy were used during Tuesday’s practice. A sleeker design, more powerful movement, sharper changes in direction and manufacturing help from sports equipment manufacturer Rogers Athletic have combined for impressive upgrades of the product invented in a partnership between Teevens and Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering. The MVP will be at a University of New Hampshire practice today. … Word around the sidelines was that defensive lineman Cody Fulleton was the star of a recent Big Green “pro day” staged as a workout showcase for scouts. Fulleton, 6-foot-3 and 285 pounds, bench-pressed 225 pounds 38 times, more than anyone at that position completed at the recent NFL Combine. He also produced a 30-inch vertical jump. … Garrett Waggoner, a 2014 Dartmouth graduate and strong safety, appears set to return to the Canadian Football League’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers, for whom he was a special teams player last season.
Tris Wykes can be reached at twykes@vnews.com or 603-727-3227.