They called them “bird dogs” in the old days, football enthusiasts who scoured high schools and recommended prospects to their alma mater. Jimmy Tindel, a 1936 Dartmouth College graduate, was one such man in the greater Philadelphia area, and he got lost one night during the mid-1950s.
Having ventured into suburban Bucks County, a bonafide gridiron hot spot, Tindel couldn’t find the football field for which he was searching in Perkasie, population 5,000. He could, however, spy nearby stadium floodlights and wound up at Pennridge High.
That unexpected turn changed Jack Crouthamel’s future, and by extension, that of Dartmouth football. Crouthamel became a star halfback, assistant and head coach, helping the Big Green to a two-decade stretch of Ivy League dominance.
Crouthamel, who stepped down at Dartmouth in 1977 before serving nearly 30 years as Syracuse University’s athletic director, died Nov. 7. He was 84.
Crouthamel was painfully competitive and a workaholic often seen as dour and aloof. Privately, however, he could enliven a gathering by playing the ukelele and once startled his daughters by tenderly caring for one of their childhood friends who’d taken a fall.
This was a gentleman who demanded total commitment from his players and maintained distance from them, yet was willing to play straight man for their pranks and overlook small acts of rebellion. Crouthamel spent his adult life as a successful coach and transformative athletic director, yet wished he could remain out of sight and mind.
“To be quite honest with you, when I’m gone, I’m gone,” Crouthanel told the Syracuse student newspaper in 2003. “I’d rather not be remembered at all.”
Those around Perkasie recalled him well enough to enshrine him in the area’s sports hall of fame during the 1990s. Crouthamel won two letters in basketball, three in track and was a star on Pennridge football teams that won all but one of 27 varsity games his last three years as a Ram.
Taken to Dartmouth by Tindel for a recruiting visit, Crouthamel later told his family that he knew the moment he entered Baker Library and smelled pipe tobacco in the air that it was the sort of setting in which he wanted to study. His dream, however, nearly evaporated when, upon returning home, his father told him the family business had gone bankrupt and that attending an expensive college was out of reach.
By that time, however, first-year Dartmouth coach Bob Blackman desired Crouthamel’s talents and he was admitted with the help of financial aid and an on-campus job.
Crouthamel enrolled at Dartmouth in 1956 as Ivy League football was making its debut and rival Princeton was only six years removed from a national title. The Indians, as they were then known, had won just 17 games that decade, but were embarking on a 15-year run of excellence under Blackman.
Because the NCAA didn’t permit freshmen to compete in varsity football at that time, Crouthamel’s profile remained low until his sophomore season, when he became a regular halfback, playing offense and defense as was the college football requirement from 1952-64.
Speedy but durable at 5 foot 11 and 190 pounds, Crouthamel was Dartmouth’s annual rushing leader each of his three varsity seasons. His league-record 722 yards and seven touchdowns during the 1958 campaign helped his squad go 7-2 overall, 6-1 in Ivy competition and capture its first Ancient Eight crown.
Crouthamel finished as Dartmouth’s career rushing leader with 1,763 yards and as a second team All-American. The history major was headed to Stanford University’s business school after his 1960 graduation, but detoured into pro football, practicing with and playing sparingly for the Boston Patriots.
It was during that fall that he met his future wife, Skidmore College student Carol Swett, at Ponzi’s Restaurant in White River Junction. The couple married the next year after Crouthamel completed the Navy’s Officer Candidate School, which he’d entered as an alternative to being drafted.
Three years in the military while coaching and playing football were followed by a season of high school coaching in Pennsylvania before Blackman called Crouthamel home to Hanover, where he joined his alma mater’s coaching staff.
By 1970, Crouthamel was the de facto defensive coordinator for what’s widely considered Dartmouth’s greatest team. That squad not only went 9-0 and shut out six of its opponents, it finished the season ranked 14th in the country and was awarded the Lambert Trophy as the best team in a region encompassing New England, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Blackman, who’d won six Ivy titles during his last nine seasons, decamped for the University of Illinois and took virtually his entire staff with him. Crouthamel, the veteran players’ choice for the job, succeeded his mentor at 32, becoming one of the country’s youngest head coaches.
“He felt tremendous pressure to do well and it probably wasn’t smart to follow a legend like that,” said Carol, noting that her husband had unsuccessfully applied for the head job at Middlebury (Vt.) College a few years earlier.
Wayne Young, then a senior linebacker, said the new leader was taciturn, whereas Blackman would easily expound on his reasoning for play-calling or personnel decisions. Carol said local storekeeper Tony Pippen, a longtime Dartmouth sports booster, good-naturedly nicknamed her husband “Stiff Guy”.
Still, Crouthamel amused his players by hollering “cheese and crackers!” in place of profanity and wearing shorts during even the coldest outdoor practices. He became the first Ivy football coach to win or share the title in each of his first three years at the helm.
The 1974 season, however, brought only three league victories, and the three after that featured 4-3 records in Ivy play. A man already tightly wound and accustomed to excellence began to crack.
Carol said her husband brooded and became distant. His daughters, Lisa and Christie, knew not to disturb their father when he returned home for dinner before settling in to sip a pint of Budweiser or a two-olive martini while reading the Valley News.
“The pressure got to him,” said Carol, who herself began to feel nauseous on game-day mornings. “I knew he was not happy.”
Said former Dartmouth sports information director Jack DeGange: “With Jake, you could enjoy the wins for about five minutes. He was the most intensely competitive person I’ve ever met.”
Crouthamel smoked roughly 30 Winston cigarettes per day but also jogged regularly until back surgery later in life. His players gawked at the size of his calves and feared his glare, which he deployed in place of shouting or angry gestures. His handshake was known to be crushing.
Current Big Green head coach Buddy Teevens, who played two varsity seasons for Crouthamel, recalls him beginning quarterback meetings in his Davis Varsity House office by tapping the tip of a fresh cigarette on his watch face while staring wordlessly at his charges.
“It was deliberate and kind of disconcerting,” Teevens said. “But he was an organized, structured and efficient person and I learned a lot of football from him.”
Crouthamel repeatedly told athletic director Seaver Peters he was done, but his friend always talked him off the ledge. With two games remaining in the 1977 season, however, the coach followed through. He resigned without any specific plans or job offers and with his gobsmacked wife having just agreed to buy a barn and summer property at Lake Sunapee.
A Big Green football connection allowed Crouthamel to snag a late interview for the Syracuse athletic director’s job. His hiring was a bit of a surprise, but he proved perfectly suited for the work, despite having no prior experience in it.
“It was the perfect solution,” Carol said. “He was a step away from the gnawing, horrible feeling he’d had all the time as a coach.”
Perhaps, but the drive to Onondaga County wasn’t much fun. The Crouthamels hit the road in a jam-packed, wood-paneled station wagon containing three sobbing women and two sedated dogs.
“We’re leaving fantasy land and heading to reality,” Jake told the crew.
Shrieked Christie, then in middle school: “You’re the worst father in the world!”
During 26 years at Syracuse, Crouthamel became a major player in NCAA athletics. He oversaw the completion of the Orange’s indoor stadium for football, basketball and lacrosse, then called the Carrier Dome. Its 1980 arrival allowed the university to not only compete at a high level in those sports, but to win national titles. The football program, which had faced calls for abolishment during the 1970s, was undefeated in 1987.
Most significantly, Crouthamel and his peers at St. John’s, Georgetown and Providence (the latter being his fraternity brother, Dave Gavitt), spearheaded the 1979 creation of basketball’s Big East Conference, which later became an all-sports circuit. It dovetailed perfectly with ESPN’s formation at roughly the same time and helped usher in college sports’ exploding era of popularity and profitability.
Derided by the press and fans as unemotional and dull, Crouthamel was beloved by many Orange coaches because he understood the difficulties they faced and the resources they needed. That he asked for little to no credit didn’t go unnoticed by those who worked for him.
Paul Pasqualoni, Syracuse’s football coach from 1991-2004, recalled his boss as an eminence grise at national meetings. Crouthamel chaired the NCAA’s football issues committee and was a member of its Division I management council and men’s basketball committee.
“Very rarely would Jake speak until everyone else was done,” said Pasqualoni, who attended a Nov. 18 memorial for Crouthamel at the Hopkins Center. “Then there would be silence and he’d take a big sip of coffee and offer his opinion.”
Carol Crouthamel said her husband was pushed out the door in advance of his official retirement in 2005, marking a sad end to a distinguished career. The Crouthamels hoped for an enjoyable retirement in Cape Cod, but that, too, went awry.
Late in their Syracuse tenure, Carol noticed that Jake’s public speaking, once witty and colorful, had become mere recitation. A diagnosis of Moderate Cognitive Impairment ushered in more than 15 years of decline, the last decade spent back in Hanover. For a time, the old coach attended Dartmouth practices and games, but those outings eventually became too difficult.
“I was so lucky because Jake never disagreed with me about doing anything,” said Carol, who has retained her charm despite difficult years as her husband’s caretaker. “But he never acknowledged that he knew what was happening to him.”
Jake Crouthamel entered a memory care facility when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. There, the man once viewed as inscrutable underwent a remarkable transformation.
“He was always smiling and everybody stopped at his room,” Carol said with a bemused expression. “I could tell the workers all enjoyed him. I thought, ‘The people at Syracuse wouldn’t believe this.’ ”
Tris Wykes can be reached at twykes@vnews.com.