The Quarterback Whisperer

by Bruce Arians

  Ben and I continued to have success with each other through the 2011 season, when Ben threw for over 4,000 yards. After losing to Denver and Tim Tebow in the first round of the playoffs in January 2012, I met with Mike Tomlin, our head coach. Tomlin told me he was going to try to get me a raise in the offseason.

  But a few days later, I was in the basement of our Reynolds Plantation home when Mike called. His voice sounded funny. I immediately knew something wasn’t right.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t get you the raise,” Mike said. “I couldn’t get you the contract.”

  “That’s all right,” I said.

  “No, no,” Mike said. “I couldn’t get you any contract.”

  “Are you firing me?” I asked.

  “I would never do that,” he said.

  “Do I have a contract?” I asked.

  “No,” Mike said.

  “Well, then you’re firing me,” I said.

  Mike asked me to come to Pittsburgh so we could talk. I told him hell no and I told him not to fly to Georgia to see me. I was hot, man. I was pissed.

  The biggest thing with me is loyalty. If you prove to me that you’ve got my back, then, brother, I’ll always have yours. I may reassign an assistant coach if it’s not working out, but I will never fire one. Never. If you’re coaching for me you’re family, and that’s not how I treat my family.

  I walked upstairs and told Chris that I had been fired from Pittsburgh. She broke down and cried. Chris wasn’t crying because I had lost my job—shit, I had been fired almost too many times to count—but she was upset because she felt betrayed by Mike, who she had put up on a pedestal. I still hold Mr. Rooney on a pedestal. The Steelers owner, who passed away in April 2017, was one of the classiest men in all of football. May he rest in peace.

  But I was bitter for a long time about being fired. But now I thank Pittsburgh for letting me go. Otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten the chance to coach Andrew Luck or had the opportunity to become head coach of the Arizona Cardinals.

  So thank you, Pittsburgh.

  Thank you so, so much.

  During practices B.A. is as intense as any coach I’ve ever been around. He can yell at you with such colorful language that it’s almost like he gives you new words that you need to look up. But then after practice he’ll ask you about your mom, your sister, your girlfriend—basically, anything that doesn’t have to do with football. He truly cares, and that’s why players across the NFL love the guy.

  –ANDREW LUCK

  CHAPTER 7

  ANDREW LUCK

  I was ready for the good life—golf and long, lazy afternoons hanging out at the lake. In January 2013, I was okay with the prospect that my coaching career was over. More important, my wife was absolutely overjoyed.

  After Mike Tomlin fired me as the offensive coordinator with the Steelers—the grapevine said that Pittsburgh’s ownership didn’t like my aggressive style and wanted a more running-based offensive attack—I believed that my headset-wearing days were over. And I was fine with that. I had always wanted to be a head coach in the NFL, but I refused to pander to anyone. I never hired an agent. Shit, I never even put together a résumé. I always figured if you needed to know my background, you could just look it up in any number of team media guides.

  We were financially set and now it was important to me to spend more time with my family. But I still wanted to keep my hands in the game, even if I wasn’t a full-time, paid coach. So I took a job preparing guys for the NFL draft. My first client was Oklahoma State wide receiver Justin Blackmon. Brother, I thought I had it made. This was going to be a real sweet gig: I wouldn’t have to travel very much, which meant more sunset drinks with Chris on the porch; I’d still be interacting with young players; and now I’d have extra pocket money for golf.

  I’d only been out of work about a week when I flew to Stillwater, Oklahoma, to meet with Justin. He was battling some issues with alcohol—at the time he had one DUI on his record—but I thought he was a really good kid and a phenomenal athlete. I put him through drills to prepare him for the upcoming NFL Combine, and he just blew me away. At 6'1'', 210 pounds, he had rare abilities. He could run a 4.4, jump through the roof, and had terrific hands. On talent alone, he was a top-three pick.

  I also put him through mock press conferences and interviews to replicate the intense scrutiny he’d encounter at the Combine. He did a fine job, I thought. We then had a long talk about his drinking, and he assured me that it wouldn’t be an issue moving forward. I believed him—and so did the coaching staff of the Jacksonville Jaguars, who would select Justin with the fourth overall pick in the draft. Sadly, however, this story didn’t have a happy ending: Justin never could shake his alcohol demon. The NFL suspended him twice for violating the league’s substance abuse policy and he was charged with two more DUIs. He hasn’t played a down in the NFL since 2013.

  But after working with Justin in Stillwater over the course of a weekend, I believed I had found what I would do in the next phase of my life. I figured I’d sign up a few potential top picks each year, prepare them for the draft, and then spend about nine months each year with Chris and my golf sticks.

  I flew from Stillwater back to Georgia. I spent a few days at the lake and then Chris and I began the drive to Pittsburgh, where we planned to pack up our apartment. By this point we had become experts in the art of moving—a side benefit to being fired nine times—and now we thought we were making the final move of our career. We were going to our “Forever Home,” as Chris calls it, in Reynolds Plantation, Georgia.

  Driving north on I-75 to return to the Steel City one last time, Chris and I talked about what was next for us. Listen, I don’t look backward. It’s not my style. There’s nothing to see in the rearview mirror. Life is to be lived, not reviewed. You learn from your past and then you move on, simple as that.

  And I had moved on. But then, just after we rolled over the Pennsylvania state line in our black GMC Denali, my cell phone buzzed. I was driving so I handed my phone to Chris. She answered. On the other end of the line was Chuck Pagano, who a few hours earlier had just been named the head coach of the Indianapolis Colts.

  Chuck said hello to Chris—we knew the Pagano family well—and then she handed the phone to me. But before I could say anything, Chris turned to me, narrowed those beautiful blue eyes of hers, and said, “You’re going to take this damn job, aren’t you?”

  I grinned at my lovely wife. I then told Chuck how happy I was that he’d landed the Colts job.

  “What’s this retirement bullshit?” Chuck said. “I need you with me.”

  “Well, what are you talking about?” I asked.

  “We’re going to have a young quarterback,” Chuck replied. “I need you to guide him and run our offense.”

  “I’ll be on a plane to Indy tomorrow,” I said.

  We spoke a few more minutes. After I hung up, I looked over at Chris.

  “What the hell,” she said, shaking her head. “Life can really be a bitch. A real bitch.”

  That was her way of conveying a simple message: The lake would wait; we were heading to Indy, another future.

  I only had one hesitation about taking the job as the offensive coordinator of the Colts: The franchise was releasing Peyton Manning.

  A few days before Chuck Pagano called me in January 2014 and offered me the chance to run his offense, I had talked to Peyton on the phone. He asked me to come to Indianapolis to check out his arm. Peyton had been through four different surgeries on his neck, and now he believed he was regaining his arm strength. He wanted me to watch him throw and give him an honest assessment of his arm.

  Then I got the job. After I met with Chuck and signed my contract, I never even saw Peyton. After Peyton was told by owner Jim Irsay and Chuck that he was being let go, he held a press conference. As always, he was class personified. He said goodbye to Colts fans in an emotional press conference. His speech of that day should be required viewin
g for high school football players across the country, because he lyrically articulated how much we all should respect the game. I wanted to be there, but I couldn’t bring myself to attend Peyton’s public farewell. It just hurt too damn much.

  There is a principal tenet about my relationship with my quarterbacks—they are my family, even when I’m not their coach. When my quarterback hurts, I hurt. That’s just how tight my bond is with them. I knew Peyton was torn up about leaving Indianapolis, and that upset me to the nth degree.

  But I agreed with the decision by Jim Irsay to move on from Peyton. Jim is a very smart man. And he knew he had a rare opportunity in front of him: The Colts had the number one overall pick in the upcoming draft, and there were two quarterbacks who we thought could be worthy of that selection: Andrew Luck out of Stanford and Robert Griffin III out of Baylor. My first big job at Indy this time around was identical to the first time around—I was to recommend which of the two who we should take.

  I went out to Stanford to meet with Andrew. He was so smart. And he’s got a goofiness that is so honest it’s uncannily cool. But it’s his intelligence that leaps out at you like a burglar from the bushes; I don’t know if I ever talked to a player who is that smart. I remember telling him to draw up a play on the board, erase it, walk out of the room, then come back and teach me that exact play. We did this several times and in a few instances when he came back in I’d say something incorrect about a play to see if I could throw him off. But Andrew busted me every time and told me he knew the game I was playing with him. What’s more, when he repeated the plays to me, he used the exact words—and I mean verbatim—that I had used. Andrew’s brain—his memory—was incredibly impressive.

  I got together with RG3 at the Combine in Indianapolis. He was sharp. He could tell you everything about the spread offense that he had run at Baylor. But I was concerned about him making the switch from the spread to the pro-style attack that we used. That was a big factor for me. I thought Andrew was more NFL-ready.

  At 6'4'', 235 pounds, Andrew was also bigger than RG3, who stood 6'2'' and weighed 220. I believed Andrew was better suited to absorb the pounding an NFL quarterback endures during the season. They both were talented guys, no question, but I ended up supporting Andrew as our pick because he was spectacularly smart and he simply seemed to be a now-ready NFL quarterback in every respect, a guy who would be the leader of our franchise on day one. And without Peyton, it was something that we needed, badly.

  I also loved the fact that Andrew came from a football family—and a worldly background, which I discovered during my research in preparation for the draft. I learned that Oliver and Kathy Luck, along with one-year-old Andrew, had moved to Germany in December 1990. Three more children—Mary Ellen, Emily, and Addison—would be born in Europe.

  Oliver, a former quarterback at West Virginia who set school records for touchdowns and completions, had been named the general manager of the Frankfurt Galaxy of the fledgling Europe-based World League of American Football. He eventually became the president of the league, which was renamed NFL Europe in 1998 and served as a developmental league for the NFL.

  Oliver has a quick, impressive mind; he spurned offers from Harvard and Yale to attend West Virginia, where he won the Louis D. Meisel Award, given to the student-athlete with the highest grade point average as a senior. He hoped Europe, where his family would live for a decade, would be a giant classroom for Andrew.

  In the days before the draft, I found out that Oliver rarely talked football with his oldest child, who was more interested in playing soccer and basketball with his European buddies. But then Andrew found a VHS tape of a 1985 Houston Oilers–San Diego Chargers game. There on the grainy video, eight-year-old Andrew saw his dad, then the starter for the Oilers, complete 24 of 42 passes for 286 yards and one touchdown in Houston’s 37–35 win. Oliver Luck had outplayed future Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Fouts.

  “Andrew must have watched that one game a thousand times,” Oliver said.

  Some Sundays, father and son stayed up deep into the night to watch NFL games that aired over the U.S. military’s Armed Forces Network. Oliver showed Andrew things—such as how Dan Marino held the ball next to his ear so he could release it quickly—but he mostly just answered Andrew’s questions, never wanting his son to feel forced to follow his footsteps into the game.

  But slowly, Andrew became increasingly intrigued by the sport. He and his dad sat together into the small hours of a Monday morning in January 1998 watching Super Bowl XXXII; Andrew was mesmerized by John Elway “doing the whirlybird”—his description of Elway’s memorable dive for a first down against the Green Bay Packers.

  Oliver took Andrew to several NFL Europe games, where Andrew saw Amsterdam Admirals quarterback Kurt Warner and his pinpoint passing lead the league in yards and touchdowns in 1998. The feathery touch Warner displayed in stadiums from Barcelona to London became one of Andrew’s most vivid images of the league. Another sweet memory for Andrew was playing games of catch with his dad in their yard in Frankfurt. It was perhaps the most red-white-and-blue experience of his early childhood.

  Eventually, Andrew pressed his father about his own NFL career, and Oliver told him about life as a Houston Oiler, where he backed up a veteran named Archie Manning in 1982 and ’83.

  The low man on the quarterback totem pole in Houston, Oliver was conscripted into a most unusual duty: babysitting. Manning, who commuted on Southwest Airlines three or four times a week to Houston from his home in New Orleans, would land at the airport and be greeted by Oliver. Archie would then hand off his two oldest boys to his personal gofer of a backup.

  Archie would head to the Oilers football facility, while Oliver chaperoned Cooper Manning and his younger brother Peyton around town, stuffing them into his Mazda RX7 and taking them to get ice cream, grab a hamburger, or play miniature golf. The car was only a two-seater, so it was usually six-year-old Peyton who had to crouch in the hatchback.

  Oliver, of course, never could have fathomed he was toting around the child who would one day become the Colts’ starting quarterback—and the man whose own unborn son would replace him as the starter in 2012.

  “That was the beginning of a long-standing relationship between the Lucks and the Mannings,” Oliver said. “It’s gotten interesting over the years, but we’ve always had a wonderful friendship.”

  Recognizing he was never going to be a top-flight NFL starter, Oliver took law school classes at night and during the offseason at the University of Texas while playing for the Oilers. He earned his law degree, cum laude, in ’87. His wife, Kathy, who already held a master’s degree in social work, also picked up her juris doctor from the University of Texas. Clearly, the Luck children come from an impressive gene pool.

  Oliver played for Houston from 1982 to 1986. He walked away from the NFL after five seasons—just long enough to qualify for his NFL pension—because there were so many other fruits in life to taste. That was a lesson he emphasized time and again to Andrew.

  As a child, Andrew loved architecture. Historic buildings held his eyes like nothing else in Europe, and he was always asking his father how things were built. In his childhood room in Frankfurt, he was the Gustave Eiffel of Lego construction.

  Andrew flourished on the soccer field and the basketball court. Those sports honed his hand-eye-foot coordination, his ability to discern passing angles, and his peripheral vision. As he matured and the seasons on the pitch and the court passed—for the record, he usually communicated with his teammates in German—he began to view both sports like chess matches; the movements of each player needed to be choreographed with the others because the team would flounder if one player made a misstep.

  He developed, as basketball great Bill Bradley once described, a sense of where you are. “Those sports help you understand how people relate to each other in space,” said Andrew.

  “Those were the two best sports Andrew could play to get him ready to be a quarterback because they emphasize
team movement and passing angles,” said Oliver. “Overall, I think the impact of living in Europe—where Andrew was exposed to different languages, different cultures—is that it made him a little more inquisitive about the world. He realized that the world was big and you should ask questions, be open-minded and tolerant.”

  When the Lucks returned to the United States in 2001—Oliver was named the CEO of the Houston Sports Authority, which builds stadiums—one of Andrew’s first questions wasn’t whether he could try a juicy longhorn steak or play football in Texas. Rather, he asked his father, “Why aren’t there any trains in the United States?”

  At age eleven, Andrew was already asking the most important question a quarterback can: Why?

  Andrew is a voracious reader of books. It is as if written words speak secrets to him. No subject is off-limits: religion, politics, biography, history. During his rookie season he revealed to a teammate that he was reading a narrative on the wild and riveting history of… concrete. Imagine that!

  Did you guys know the Roman Colosseum was built mostly of concrete? And the Hoover Dam as well? That is a young man committed to unraveling as many yarns of life’s complexities as possible.

  Shortly after returning to the United States, Andrew began doing what virtually all twelve-year-old boys do in the Lone Star State: He played Pop Warner football. For two seasons, Oliver was his coach. The boy wanted to play quarterback, mostly because that was the position he saw his old man master on that VHS tape.

  Andrew was a natural, as if everything his father knew about the game had been transferred to him via genetic code. Talking about why his son is successful at football, Oliver cited the book Freakonomics, in which authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt argue the number one trait that determines whether a child will become a professional baseball player is not size, speed, or education; it is simply if his father was a professional baseball player. It’s hard to argue with that logic.