A Perfect 10

A Perfect 10

By Bruce Wood

It's a message Buddy Teevens has been preaching to his young team for two years. Winning, the Dartmouth coach reminds his players time and again, isn't a matter of hoping. It's a matter of believing.
Winning, Teevens explains to them, is about expecting to come out on top and then going out and doing whatever you have to do to make it happen.
No team in the past three decades embraced that philosophy more fully and more successfully than the 1996 Big Green, which 10 years ago this fall completed the only undefeated and untied season Dartmouth has enjoyed in 35 years.
On the way to becoming the first 10-0 team in school history, the Big Green won low-scoring games (6-3 against Harvard) and high-scoring games (38-21 against Cornell). It won by overpowering a once-beaten team (40-0 against Columbia) and by sneaking past a .500 team (27-24 against Brown). It won with a little bit of luck and a lot of faith. It won with character and characters.
“We had every ingredient,” said Roger Hughes, the Dartmouth offensive coordinator at the time and today head coach at Princeton. “We had a chemistry. I know the type of kids we had. They were committed to football. They loved to have a good time but they knew when to say when. They knew right from wrong and were great character kids.
“If you look at New England and you look at the pros now, everyone is trying to figure out the secret we had in '96. Commitment to team. Commitment to football. Commitment to each other. That, even above great athletic ability, was what set that team apart.”
If the '96 squad was a team of destiny, that destiny was forged in the opener again Penn. Dartmouth trailed the Quakers, 22-18, when it got the ball back with under three minutes remaining and everything on the line. Only once had a team dropped its Ivy League opener and gone on to win the conference title outright.
“That drive was the culmination of everything our senior class had worked for,” said Jon Aljancic, the starting quarterback. “It was really the defining moment of the whole season because we don't go undefeated and maybe we don't win the league if we don't win that game.”

Taking over at his own 45 with 2:34 remaining, Aljancic engineered a 12-play march kept alive by a clutch, six-yard completion to fullback Pete Oberle on a fourth-and-four from the Penn 49. Greg Smith's two-yard run on third-and-two then gave the Big Green a first down at the Penn eight with 33 seconds left.
A crowd of 8,521 was on the edge of its seats when Aljancic called the decisive play of the game. “High right, 68 Z cross,” he recalled from his Illinois home. “I may be off on the letter. I think we had Will Bergman crossing on the left and Morty coming over from the right.”
Morty — 5-9 speedster Eric Morton — rubbed a defender off on his fellow wide receiver to get separation and with 19 seconds remaining in the game cradled a throw from Aljancic as he tumbled to the Memorial Field end zone.
“I'll never forget seeing Eric cross the goal line,” said Aljancic. “We'd had trouble beating Penn and getting that monkey off our backs was big.”
The touchdown wouldn't have meant anything if the Dartmouth defense hadn't done its part, limiting Penn to 92 yards in the second half. After surrendering 15 straight points, future NFL players Lloyd Lee, Zack Walz and the rest of the defense shut the Quakers out over their final four possessions to give the offense a chance to win it at the end.
Walz finished with 16 tackles, two forced fumbles, a sack and a pass breakup.
“That was the best game I played in my life, before or since,” Walz said from his Arizona office. “I didn't get tired. I felt invincible from start to finish. I still remember going over the tailback to sack the quarterback. That game we were just so determined.”
That determination was on display again the next week as the Big Green survived yet another close call. This time it was Lee forcing and recovering a fumble at the Lehigh 21 to set up the winning touchdown before the safety came back and snuffed out the Engineers' bid to tie the game with his second interception in a 21-14 win with 2:28 remaining.
After the two close calls, Dartmouth overpowered Fordham, Holy Cross, Yale and Cornell in succeeding weeks before suffocating defense and a little luck allowed the Big Green to sneak past Harvard, 6-3, in the 100th meeting between the teams.
With a chance to tie, the Crimson's Ryan Korinke's 39-yard field goal attempt with three seconds remaining bounced harmlessly off the upright.
“I'll never forget it,” Aljancic said of the kick. “The sun was in my eyes so I really couldn't see. When he kicked it I thought it was good. I was getting ready to put my helmet on for overtime and then the thing ricochets back at us. The sense of relief had you thinking, maybe this was our year.”
Columbia, led by future NFL standout Marcellus Wiley, arrived in Hanover the next week with a 6-1 record, an attitude and a determination to jump right back into a tie for the Ivy League lead. But with NFL prospect Brian Larsen neutralizing Wiley and Aljancic completing 17-of-24 passes for 258 yards and two touchdowns, Dartmouth dismantled the Lions, 40-0.
According to Hughes, Aljancic — the elusive left-hander who completed barely 40 percent of his passes with four touchdowns as a junior and then exploded on the Ivy League with 60 percent passing and 10 touchdowns a year late — was a bellwether of the Big Green.
“He came to me in spring,” Hughes recalled. “He'd tried to play football and baseball, and had given up baseball. He sat down with me and said, 'I'm a thrower, not a runner.' I fell right off my chair laughing.
“It was the most unbelievable thing, but he did it. He typified our team. He had a charisma and a personality, and a confidence that things were going to get done.'
At Brown one week after Columbia, the Big Green somehow got it done again. With the game against the Bears tied at 24 after three

quarters, Brown missed the go-ahead field with 6:25 left. Dartmouth then got a 20-yard field goal from Dave Regula with 1:30 showing to go up, 27-24. And still the game wasn't over.
Brown turned right around and marched to the Big Green 27. Needing a field goal to force overtime or a touchdown to win the game, the Bears seemed on the verge of the latter when Sean Morey broke free and Jason McCullough put the ball right on him. But fate intervened when Morey, one of the finest receivers in Ivy League history, unaccountably dropped the sure touchdown throw.
“It just slipped through his fingers,” said Aljancic. “That's the essence of sports. We'd had plenty of times when that catch was made against us. For some reason, our destiny was to win that game.”
The second nailbiting win in three games now history, Dartmouth avoided theatrics in the season finale one week later, methodically taking apart Princeton, 24-0, to clinch the outright title and the unbeaten season.
“We created our own breaks but we had also gotten a little help along the way,” said Aljancic. “That's why we decided to put all that stuff to rest in the Princeton game. We weren't going to tempt fate one more time.”
Walz, who went on to play five years in the NFL with the Arizona Cardinals, remembers the perfect season fondly. “It wasn't just one thing that made that team special,” he said. “For one, we had an offensive line that returned together and an NFL-caliber (offensive lineman) in Brian Larsen. Aljancic was a weapon. Oberle was healthy again.
“The guys had been in the trenches. We'd been a field goal away from winning it the year before and I remember the seniors crying after the last game because they were so close. We weren't going to let that happen again.”
Teevens wasn't there but he knows why they didn't; because they expected to win and then went out and made it happen.

A veteran writer and observer of Dartmouth athletics, Bruce Wood launched a web site last year, www.biggreenalert.com, specializing in Big Green football news coverage.