Absence of Teevens leaves keen sense of void at annual Manning Passing Academy

If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a legion of people to replace Buddy Teevens at the Manning Passing Academy.

For 26 years, Teevens was a fixture at the Manning Passing Academy. He was there from the beginning. Teevens was the head coach at Tulane when the Mannings, the first family of football, decided to start a camp to teach young quarterbacks various aspects of the passing game.

The MPA was held for the first time at Tulane in 1996. The camp quickly outgrew the New Orleans campus of the Green Wave and moved on to Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond before settling at its current home of Nicholls State University in Thibodaux.

The four-day camp, held each summer, has drawn more than 1,000 young football players from across the nation and Canada. Top college quarterbacks from all over the country serve as camp counselors, helping to teach the upcoming crop of signal callers.

The 2024 edition of the camp that concluded Sunday, had approximately 1,300 campers.

Teevens served as head coach at his alma mater, Dartmouth College of the Ivy League, before becoming the coach at Tulane. Following his five-year stint from 1992-1996 as Green Wave coach, Teevens coached at several schools, as an assistant and a head coach, before returning to Dartmouth in 2005, where he went on to become the winningest coach in Big Green history.

Regardless of where he was located during his football travels, he returned each year to run the Manning Passing Academy.

“This was his baby because he started it way back in 1996 when he was at Tulane and when Peyton approached him and Archie and said, ‘hey, we’d like to do a quarterback camp,’” said Frank Monica, also a longtime fixture at the MPA. “The idea came from when Peyton had gone to Alabama to one of those camps over there.

“The Manning family has been tremendous. The Manning family, they basically were the celebrities of the camp, but Buddy was the guy who was the nuts and bolts of it and put it all together. When you organize 1,300 kids out there on these fields, it takes a special breed of cat to do that.”

Teevens was a cat, Monica said, who didn’t mind getting his paws dirty.

“This camp was Buddy Teevens,” said Monica. “He had his stamp on it. He came a week early. He marked off fields. He wasn’t afraid to go put chalk down and put cones out. He did all the grunt work that you wouldn’t think (someone like) a CEO of the camp would do.”

Teevens has been absent from the camp for the past two years.

In March of 2023, Teevens was hit by a pickup truck while riding his bike in Florida. His injuries severe, Teevens missed the camp for the first time ever. Few, however, knew the extent of the injuries.

“My staff was so interested, of course, with Buddy and how it was,” recalled Archie Manning. “The family knew how bad it was, but they didn’t choose to throw that out there and I understood that. I told them I said, ‘don’t tell me, just don’t tell me how bad. If it’s really bad, how bad it is because I don’t want to do anything against the family and my staff wants to know. So we just kind of kept everybody in the dark. I was in the dark.

“Last year, one time during the camp he talked to his brother-in-law and asked him about how many campers we had. We looked at that as improvement, but he didn’t make it.”

Teevens, who suffered a spinal cord injury and had a leg amputated, died on Sept. 19, 2023, at the age of 66.

Many of the coaches and counselors return each year. Without Teevens, the reunions are bittersweet.

“When camp rolls around, we get excited, but it almost makes me sad. It’s so sad. I don’t know how many times we’ve said it already, getting this first practice over with and we used a lot of Buddy’s sayings, and we feel like he’s kind of here. The Dartmouth guys are still here. A lot of his family comes as part of the camp, but we can’t believe he’s gone,” Archie said.

“He was great. He just ran everything and got to be such a good friend to our family,” said Peyton Manning. “All of our coaches have been here for so many years. You look forward to seeing them every single year around this time. It just doesn’t feel the same without Buddy here. But he’s here in spirit and his family’s represented.

“A lot of the things that he instilled in our coaches and in the organization of this camp are very evident today. We still feel like he’s here and very much a part of us. He was one-of-a-kind person, a heck of a coach, but even better human being.”

Monica knew Teevens more than just as a yearly Manning Passing Academy co-worker. The retired Louisiana high school Hall of Fame football coach served two different stints as an assistant at Tulane, including all six years Teevens was the head coach of the Green Wave.

“He kept me on the staff at Tulane and we worked together. We recruited together for a long, long time, and I got to know him,” said Monica. “When he left, he was heartbroken because the group that we actually recruited, two years later, went 12-0. He didn’t get a chance to enjoy the fruits of that recruiting process of those guys.”

“Buddy was just a fireball of energy,” Monica recalled. “Whatever he did, he did full speed, whether he was driving, riding a cart, jogging, or running. He was an avid runner. He loved to exercise and kept his body in great shape. He never ate bad food.”

That fireball energy allowed Teevens to wear so many hats at the Manning Passing Academy that it makes it hard to replace him.

“Buddy was the brains behind this, just coordinating how to get 1,500 kids in the different groups and put them in their teams and what the rotation of the of the whole camp and getting them from station to station and who was coaching what,” said Eli Manning. “He did it all by himself. It’s taken a full team to come in and try to replace him and to do what he was able to do.

“Luckily, we’ve been doing this for 28 years and have enough leadership and enough people that know the flow of this and can help out the younger people and help get it all together. We miss Buddy so much and you can’t replace him just because of his personality, his attitude, his energy he brought and the positivity he brought. It’s not the same without him.”

Among those tasked with trying to fill Teevens’ role at the Manning Passing Academy is Ken Manne. Manne is Teevens’ brother-in-law.

“Buddy had always been doing camp the camp and he would always talk about it. We’d get together and he gave me a shirt and said, ‘you should come sometime,” Manne remembered “I was raising a young family. I want to say probably 10 years ago or so I said, ‘hey, I’d love to come to camp.’ He said,’ alright, I’ll make you a field coordinator.’

“So I started small, one field, figuring it out, making sure the guys are in the right places. I’m not a football guy. I’m actually general counsel of a large insurance company, but I’m very organized and can tell people to get to the right place at the right time. I did that for a number of years. I always roomed with Buddy in the in the dorms and a couple of the other Dartmouth guys that came.”

Manne recalled how Teevens did all of the organizational stuff himself.

“He would get here Tuesday night. He’d sit in that corner (of the Century Club room under Guidry Stadium) and he’d just put it all together without any help. I would hang out with him, so I kind of knew his system where the old quarterbacks are ‘OQ’ and the young quarterbacks are ‘YQ’ and how you get them on the fields.”

Manne offered up his services to try and fill the void left by Teevens.

“Archie used to joke that if anything ever happened to Buddy or ‘Hawk’ (Jeff Hawkins) ‘I don’t know if we’re gonna have camp because the roles that they played.’ When he (Teevens) got hurt last year, I reached out to Hawk and I said, ‘I can help. I know how he does it.’”

Hawkins is the MPA camp director who was on the Tulane football staff when the camp began and has been a part of the even ever since. Manne has the title of Coaching Operations Director.

“Then Archie made a real good decision. He asked me and David Morris to kind of share the duties because David’s from QB Country (a quarterback training and development company). David was Eli’s backup quarterback and roommate at Ole Miss. He knows football. David and I are kind of a new tag-team in running the coaching operation side of camp. I’m on the organizational side where I know where to put the campers, like we will have OQ1 through OQ8 on the baseball field, along those lines,” said Manne.

Also tagging in is Robert Ratliff, who coordinates all the 7-on-7 games at the camp.

“We have 108 7-on-7 teams Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday mornings. It took three of us to replace Buddy,” Manne said.

So much of what transpires at the MPA comes from Teevens’ organizational playbook.

“Buddy set a great example. I’s taken two to take his place. His brother-in-law, Ken Manne, is unbelievable. David Moore was Eli’s backup at Ole Miss. David has just stepped up. It’s actually three. Robert Ratliff, who is a young coach, kind of runs our 7-on-7 program – what those guys have done in Buddy’s absence, my hat’s off to them. I’m so indebted to them,” said Archie. “We wanted our camp to keep going strong. We’re proud of it. It just gives me so much joy to see these kids anticipate and want to come and be excited and get better and learn.”

Teevens has definitely left an indelible mark on the Manning Passing Academy’s patriarch.

“I’m so proud of the fact that 26 years we worked together, and we never had a disagreement. We never, ever. We agreed on everything. We enjoyed each other’s company. I love his family. We miss him. I miss him. I miss him every day,” said Archie.