The Quarterback Whisperer

by Bruce Arians

  Coach came up to me. “Shit, y’all ought to be late more often,” he said. “That was the best damn practice y’all had all year.”

  Then he drove off. Another lesson learned: A head coach who is a little bit feared is a good thing.

  The Bear, who sometimes played his three top quarterbacks in a game, treated each one like family. Every Saturday morning he would take a slow walk with his top QBs outside the team hotel. As they strolled together, Coach Bryant would tell them how much he believed in them, how much he cared for them, and how proud he was of each one. Coach Bryant’s stern, stark stare could make you cry for your momma, but he was also as compassionate as any coach I’d ever worked with.

  Why did his players work so hard for him? Because they knew he loved them. That was another lesson I learned.

  In December 1982, I was in Florida on a recruiting trip when I stopped by the office of Howard Tippett, then a coach with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Opening his door, I saw that Howard was speaking with Jimmy Gruden, the team’s running backs coach and father of sons Jon and Jay.

  “You guys want to go get a drink?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Howard said. “By the way, Jimmy, this is the guy they should hire at Temple.”

  Jimmy looked at me closely. He had friends on the search committee at Temple, which had just fired its head football coach. “You want to be the head coach at Temple?” Jimmy asked.

  “Sure,” I said, shocked as hell and not really understanding what was going on.

  “You’re one of Coach Bryant’s boys, right?” Jimmy asked.

  “Yes, I am,” I replied.

  “Well, you need to get a résumé to the Temple people right away,” Jimmy said.

  Of course, I didn’t have a résumé—that wasn’t my style—so I express mailed the search committee an Alabama game program along with a letter stating that I wanted to become the next head coach at Temple. A few days later I was on a plane to Philadelphia to interview for the job. But first I had some important business to finish. The Bear was about to coach in his final game, and there was no way on God’s green earth we were going to let him go out with anything but a win.

  Up until this point in my career I never feared losing—until the 1982 Liberty Bowl.

  On December 15, 1982, a week earlier, Bryant walked into a press conference in Tuscaloosa that aired on radio and TV. What he said brought the state to a standstill. There were reports of huge crowds in grocery stores across Dixie as people strained to hear his words. People driving to work pulled over onto shoulders of roads. Kids getting ready for school didn’t run for their bus; instead they waited to learn what the Bear was going to say.

  “There comes a time in every profession when we need to hang it up, and that has come for me as head coach at the University of Alabama,” Coach Bryant said. “I’m a tired old man, but I’ll never get tired of football.”

  We knew the world would be watching his final game in Memphis against Illinois. In the days leading up to the game the assistants hardly even slept; we were too nervous. “We can’t lose this game,” I must have said a thousand times before kickoff. “We just can’t. They won’t let us back into the state if we don’t win. We can’t let down Coach.”

  Days before his final game, Sports Illustrated writer John Underwood phoned the sixty-nine-year-old Bryant to ask him why he was hanging up his famous houndstooth hat.

  “Because four damn losses is too damn many,” Coach Bryant said, noting how many games we had lost that season. “I’m up to my ass in alligators, John. These new young coaches just have too much energy for me. We need someone younger.”

  “So you really are tired?” Underwood asked.

  “Naw,” said Bryant. “To tell you the truth, I feel great. I got so many things I’ve been wantin’ to do for so long, and now I’m gonna get to ’em.”

  “Like what?” Underwood said.

  “I’m not sure just yet,” Bryant replied.

  An estimated audience of 50 million tuned in to the game—millions around the world watched via the Armed Forces Network—to see Coach Bryant patrol the sideline one last time. We beat Illinois 21–15. I can still picture the smile on Coach Bryant’s face as he hugged each and every one of his players in the locker room. He was so happy—and all of us assistants were so damn relieved.

  I took dozens of mental snapshots of the Bear that night in Memphis. I still cherish my time with Bryant, and the things he did for me and taught me.

  I didn’t think I had a shot at the Temple job; I viewed the situation as a way to practice for when I’d really have a chance to become a head coach. The first people I met were Temple alum and former football star Bill Bernardo and his wife; Bill was on the search committee. They picked me up at the Philadelphia airport. As soon as I slid into their car, Bill asked me, “What would you like to do?”

  I hadn’t been back in Pennsylvania—my home state—for a few years, and I was dying for some old-school Italian food. “Man, I haven’t had a good Italian meal in a long, long time,” I said.

  We went to Cuz’s restaurant in Philly and ate until we nearly threw up—mounds and mounds of pasta and great quantities of red wine. We hit it off like long-lost friends. Bill told stories that put me on the edge of my seat, detailing how he was Bill Cosby’s high school coach in Philadelphia. We had so much fun. By the end of the night I knew I had Bill and his wife on my side.

  When I met with the vice president of the school, he asked me, “What’s your philosophy?” I said I didn’t have one. “But I do have a plan,” I replied. “Our guys are going to go to class and they’re going to graduate. We’re going to win football games and we’re going to be gentlemen and we’re going to do something called the Fifth Quarter. Every Thursday night during the offseason I’ll take one group of position players out into the community—to a hospital, an orphanage—and we’ll give back. We’ll show a highlight film and we’ll just interact with the locals, which will help our kids grow and tighten our bond to the community.”

  Just like that, the VP was on board with me. Ten days later I was named Temple’s next head coach. I was thirty, making me then the youngest head coach in all of college football. I was nervous and wasn’t entirely sure I was ready to become a head coach, but I knew that I could always call Coach Bryant and ask his advice. I figured I might call him as often as once a week during the upcoming season.

  I returned to Alabama to say my goodbyes. I walked into Coach Bryant’s office and we embraced. I asked him questions about recruiting and organization, and then he told me about the nature of coaching—and life, really. “You get a job,” he said, “and you do a hell of a job at it. You look for a better job until there ain’t no better job. Then you work your ass to keep that job.”

  Then, before I left his office, Coach Bryant told me to carry one piece of wisdom with me for the rest of my days.

  “Coach them hard,” Coach Bryant told me, “and hug them harder later.”

  Those were the last words Bryant ever uttered to me. They became my guiding philosophy.

  From that day forward I would try to find out what makes a player tick and continually build on the players’ strengths and not prey on their weaknesses—just like Coach Bryant did. You always need to fix some of their weaknesses, but you first pad their confidence so that it grows, and then they can attack their weaknesses.

  Like Coach Bryant, I would be hard on my players when we were on the field. But that’s just coaching. The players need to know that I’m probably going to talk to them real ugly out on the field, but that has nothing to do with them personally or with their personality. Their football can suck and they can still be good kids. Don’t take it personally. It’s coaching, not criticism. Don’t worry if I call you a “motherfucker” on the field. It’s business, not personal.

  And I vowed that day after leaving Coach Bryant’s office that when I walked off the field with my players, I would hug the ones I had MF’d only moments earlier—just like Bryant
did. I’d tell them we’re going to get our football perfect, we’re not going to beat ourselves, and now that we’re done with football for the day we can talk all night long about our personal lives. And I would care about all my players, from the starting quarterback down to the third-string tight end. That’s the prime role of a college head coach. He must help his players grow into young men of substance—men with confidence, character, and knowledge beyond the field. That’s what makes coaching football so special.

  Twenty-seven days after his last game, Bear experienced severe chest pains and was driven to Druid City Regional Medical Center in Tuscaloosa. By the next morning, though, he was feeling better and his family expected him to be released. Around noon he was sitting upright in his hospital bed with a yellow notepad in his hands, writing down reminders of things he wanted to do, words he wanted to say to those who mattered most to him. Ray Perkins, his replacement, stopped by to check in with his mentor; Bryant upbraided him for not being out on the recruiting trail.

  Then, while in his bed eating lunch, Coach Bryant suffered a massive heart attack at 12:24 p.m. central standard time on January 26, 1982. Doctors frantically tried to revive him, but at 1:30, the call was made: The Bear was dead. In past years Coach Bryant had often ominously joked that he would “croak within a week” if he ever stopped coaching; it actually took twenty-eight days.

  The news traveled quickly across Alabama, as if carried by the winter breeze that blew on that gray southern day. Grown men openly wept, like they’d just lost their most cherished family member. Farmers, steelworkers, lawyers, and stay-at-home moms stopped what they were doing, as if the realization that Bryant was gone took away the collective breath of the entire state in one seismic gut punch. Coach Bryant’s passing was a lead story on all the national networks. “The Bear is dead,” said Tom Brokaw on NBC. Local broadcasters labored to summon the strength not to break down on camera; some were more successful than others. Schoolteachers all across the state, many teary-eyed, stopped their classes to break the news to their students. That night President Ronald Reagan called Mary Harmon, Coach Bryant’s widow, to offer condolences, to tell her that the nation was now mourning with her.

  Bryant was the only coach in America, it was often said in the Heart of Dixie, who “can take his’n and beat your’n, and take your’n and beat his’n.” When the Bear did suffer a rare loss, he’d appear on his weekly television show and the cohost would tell him, “The Lord just wasn’t with us, Coach.” Coach Bryant, without missing a beat, would respond with a growl, “The Lord expects you to block and tackle.”

  I was in my new office at Temple when I heard the news. I had worried about his health, but of course I never saw his end coming. He loved golfing and he had enough things on his mind to keep him busy, and I thought he’d live for years.

  Two days after his passing, I flew to Alabama on a little twin-propeller plane and attended Bryant’s funeral at the First United Methodist Church in Tuscaloosa. The tiny church couldn’t accommodate the surge of well-wishers who had flown in from around the country to say goodbye to the Bear. Every head coach from the SEC was present, as were Nebraska’s Bob Devaney and former Ohio State coach Woody Hayes. Hundreds of former players attended, as did reporters from as far as New York and Chicago. To enable everyone to see the short service, closed-circuit television cameras were installed and then relayed to monitors in two other nearby churches. After the final prayer was uttered at First United Methodist, eight Alabama players carried Bryant’s casket down the steps of the church. As his body was placed in a white hearse, more than 200 photographers frantically clicked away, their flashes popping like lightning through the gray afternoon.

  The funeral procession stretched three miles and consisted of nearly 300 cars, including six buses filled with former and present-day players and coaches. As the procession rolled down 10th Street in Tuscaloosa, thousands of locals stood four, five, and six deep to see Bryant a final time, waving at the hearse in respectful silence. The procession slowed when it passed Bryant-Denny Stadium, as if to give the coach one last look at the soaring cathedral where he made so many dreams come true, the place where his legend was forged. And then it pulled onto Interstate 20/59 and headed east for Birmingham.

  On the interstate, cars and trucks and eighteen-wheelers pulled to the side. The drivers and passengers stood next to their vehicles in silence as Coach Bryant rolled toward his final resting spot. Overpasses were clogged with onlookers—men placed their fedoras over their chests, women wept, children in Crimson Tide jackets gazed in wide-eyed wonder at the spectacle. All along the fifty-five miles from Tuscaloosa to Elmwood Cemetery in Birmingham the interstate was lined with people young and old, Yankees and southerners, all compelled to stand in the chill of the winter afternoon and cry and grieve and tell stories about Paul William Bryant. To Alabamians, this was a state funeral, every bit as significant as a president being laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery. The Birmingham News estimated that 250,000 people had witnessed the procession, which meant that one of every twelve residents of Alabama had bid farewell to Bryant in person.

  I’d never seen such love for a head coach—and I never will again.

  “It was a great blessing for Bruce to coach under Bear Bryant,” Chris says. “Bruce became one of his many disciples, which meant he became respected all around the country. It changed how people in coaching viewed Bruce. Bear tested Bruce, and he wanted Bruce to stand up for what he thought was right and what he believed in. But Coach Bryant also valued everybody and he made you feel valued when you were with him. Bruce learned that from him and followed his example. That became part of who Bruce is. Bruce took his death hard—we all did—because he admired the Bear as much as his father. But Bruce didn’t have time to be sad. He was a young coach and also a young father of two. He had to move on, and I know that’s what the Bear would have told him to do. But it was definitely the end of an era for us.”

  When I was in my first year at Temple, trying to build the program and raise expectations, I constantly found myself uttering phrases that came straight from Coach Bryant’s mouth. I also leaned on him for a few pregame one-liners.

  Before we faced Boston College and their record-setting quarterback Doug Flutie in 1983, I told my players to gather around me in the locker room. The season before, Flutie had beaten us with a touchdown pass late in the fourth quarter, and now I didn’t want any of our players to be nervous. So I used one of my favorite Bear Bryant sayings.

  “Okay guys,” I said, “I just want to see you bouncing across that field like you’re running on an acre of titties.”

  The players doubled over in laughter, which was precisely why I said it. They went onto the field and had a blast, playing loose and fast. We lost 18–15. After the game one of my players approached me in the locker room.

  “Coach,” he said, “I’ll never forget running across the field on an acre of titties.”

  Chris’s life may have been more daunting than mine at Temple. We’ve always been a team—Chris could write her own book about the struggles of being a coach’s wife—and in Philadelphia she really became the leader of our family. She had to sell our house in Tuscaloosa, find a new place in Philadelphia, and locate daycare for our two small children. She also enrolled in law school.

  “It was tough being one of the few women in the class who was older and had a family to take care of,” Chris says. “It was overwhelming. But the cool thing was that Bruce was able to bring in guys he’d coached with and played with. This is the thing about Bruce: He’s incredibly loyal. So the staff became one big family at Temple.

  “But by the sixth year, things weren’t going the way we’d hoped. We knew we should have been winning bowl games. And Bruce was physically burned out. He was getting migraine headaches. He felt so responsible for his assistants and he was worried to death about their families. He’s too stubborn to quit. So honestly it was a relief when he got fired. And amazing thing is, once he left Templ
e he never really got the migraines again. Of course, we never thought in a million years it would take so long for him to get another shot at being a head coach.”

  In Indianapolis, Andrew Luck required more hugs than oral hits. I knew I couldn’t be as hard on him as I had been with other quarterbacks, because Andrew—a bighearted people pleaser—was more sensitive. So, with this co-valedictorian of the class of 2008 at Stratford High in Houston and Stanford graduate, I assumed the role of the encouraging professor.

  On Saturday nights before games during Andrew’s rookie year, 2012, I reviewed the game plan in painstaking detail with him. I would ask him what plays were his favorites, and then he’d weave them into the script of the first thirty plays the team would run.

  Andrew excelled at throwing the long ball, and so I always put six long bombs in our plan for each game. I constantly told Andrew to take a shot if the defense appeared vulnerable based on its pre-snap formation. “If it’s third-and-three and you got T.Y. [Hilton] on a deep route, then throw the fucking ball to T.Y.,” I’d tell Andrew. “I don’t care that we only need three yards. Throw the ball to T.Y.”

  Andrew also was extremely accurate on the up-the-seam throws. Seam balls separate quarterbacks. A seam ball is when you have three receivers running deep routes, two on the outside and one on the inside. The seam is the throw to the inside receiver; you have to get it over the linebacker and in front of the safety. It’s one of the more difficult throws to make. A lot of quarterbacks can’t find that guy in the middle. But Andrew could, and did, nearly every time. He made those tosses look effortless.

  Late in Andrew’s rookie year we traveled to Detroit. With about six minutes to play in the fourth quarter, we were trailing 33–21 when Andrew threw an interception. It looked like the game was over. But when he reached the sideline, he was fuming and yelling at the top of his lungs, “Let’s win this. Let’s win this.” He then jogged over to the defensive unit. “You stop them and we’ll win this game,” he screamed. “Stop them.”