Buddy Teevens was more than Dartmouth’s all-time winningest football coach. He was a colorful trailblazer who devoted his career to making the game safer and more inclusive, influencing countless lives along the way.
“Nothing was showy about him, nothing was about him,” said NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, among his close friends. “Everything was about the people around him, the people who played for him, his college. You saw that loyalty, that strength, the tremendous values that he had. You wanted to be with Buddy anytime he would let you.”
Teevens, who died in 2023 at age 66 six months after he was hit by a truck while riding his bicycle in Florida, is memorialized in “The Buddy Way,” an uplifting, feature-length documentary that debuts at 2 p.m. PT Wednesday on ESPN2 and ESPN+, the latest offering from Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions.
Manning, too, was especially close to Teevens, as the longtime coach helped run the Manning Passing Academy, the camp that draws the nation’s best high school quarterbacks — as well as the top college quarterbacks, as counselors — to Louisiana every summer.
“Every summer, Buddy was a mainstay in our life,” said Manning, a Hall of Fame quarterback who won Super Bowls with the Indianapolis Colts and Denver Broncos. “That was my motivation. When you’re evaluating a story you always need to say, look, your intentions are great but are people going to be interested in this? Is it that unique of a story? In this case it was.”
The irrepressibly enthusiastic Teevens, a onetime undersized quarterback who was Ivy League Player of the Year at Dartmouth, made a risky decision at his alma mater in 2010 when he became the first coach to eliminate full-contact practices. He in part motivated Dartmouth’s engineering school to create the Mobile Virtual Player, a robotic tackling device eventually used by other college teams and in the NFL.
Ridiculed at first, Teevens’ no-tackling-in-practice approach was eventually adopted by the entire Ivy League. The NFL was on a similar track and limited full-contact practices in the name of player safety.
What’s more, Teevens was a pioneer in hiring female coaches, some of whom made their way to the NFL. This season, the league had 15 women working as full-time coaches.
“We just felt really strongly that his story couldn’t die with him,” said Jane Skinner Goodell, who served as one of the executive producers along with Dartmouth alumnus Murry Bowden and Manning. “You don’t meet people like Buddy Teevens very often, maybe once in your life if you’re lucky. He cared so deeply about people, about doing the right thing. Doing the right thing no matter what. So we just wanted to help pay that goodness forward in some way.”
The documentary is directed by Rory Karpf, who traces Teevens’ four-decade football career with never-before-seen footage and interviews with the coach’s family, friends and players. Karpf also directed “The Book of Manning,” the popular documentary that tells the story of Archie and Olivia Manning and sons Cooper, Peyton and Eli.
Peyton Manning said he felt compelled to work on this project after losing a string of people close to him in recent years, among them longtime ESPY Awards producer Maura Mandt and Demaryius Thomas, former star receiver for the Broncos.
The quarterback established scholarships in the names of Mandt and Thomas, as well as the Buddy Teevens Award, presented to a coach who has made a lasting impact on the game. Last week, Army coach Jeff Monken received the inaugural Teevens Award.
Moreover, Manning said “The Buddy Way” — which eventually will live on Disney+ — is just the type of story that inspired the creation of Omaha.
“Our theme is positive, unifying stories that celebrate hard work, a sense of community and peoples’ accomplishments,” he said. “That is Buddy Teevens and this story to a T. It’s emotional and sadness is a part of it, but it’s inspiring. It is a unifying story. That’s exactly what we started the company for, to tell stories like this and try to make an impact in a positive way.”