by Bruce Arians
At Stratford High in Houston—where Andrew was usually in one of two places: the library or the football field—he threw for 7,139 yards and 53 touchdowns. He was, according to Rivals.com, the nation’s fourth-ranked pro-style quarterback in 2008. He had an uncanny touch on his throws, like Kurt Warner lighting up the old stadiums in Europe.
The one knock on Luck was that he didn’t have elite arm strength, but what recruiting analysts didn’t know—because Andrew didn’t tell them—was that he rarely unleashed his fastball because he was afraid it would be too hard for his receivers to catch.
Andrew was the co-valedictorian of his class, and he dreamed of designing stadiums. The venues he saw in his youth throughout Europe—iconic structures such as Wembley Stadium in London and Rheinstadion in Düsseldorf—remained vivid in his mind. “I was infatuated with stadiums,” he said.
Nick Saban, Bob Stoops, and virtually every big-name coach in the nation traveled to Stratford High to recruit Andrew, but he wanted to attend a school that had as much heritage in academics as athletics. By his junior year, he had narrowed his list of schools to five: Stanford, Purdue, Northwestern, Virginia, and Rice.
Stanford’s coach at the time, former NFL quarterback Jim Harbaugh, was smitten with Andrew the first time he met him. Aside from Andrew’s prototypical size and 4.6 forty-yard speed, Harbaugh was most impressed by the testimonials of Luck’s teammates, each of whom expressed unequivocal admiration for their quarterback.
“Andrew is just so sharp mentally, so quick-minded,” said Harbaugh back in January 2011. “And then just the easy personality to be around. He’s like a dolphin; you know, he’s really smart, he’s always having fun and he’s laughing and joking.… He’s just so technically sound, so good with his mechanics, so great with his eye discipline.”
Andrew majored in architectural design at Stanford. In the summer of 2009, he was a corporate sales intern with the San Jose Earthquakes of Major League Soccer. The following spring, for one class, he helped design a disaster-relief shelter and community for a site outside of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake shattered the country.
From afar, several of us in the NFL wondered: Is Andrew Luck too good to be true?
It was important to Andrew to earn his degree, so after consulting with a longtime family friend—Peyton Manning, who had stayed in school for his senior year at Tennessee—he returned to “the Farm” for his senior year. In 2011, Andrew’s final year at Stanford, the football coaches were so confident of their starting quarterback that they freighted him with more responsibility than most NFL QBs carry. Luck went to the line of scrimmage with three plays, and, depending on the defensive alignment he saw, he’d choose which play to run. That year, he led the Cardinals to an 11–2 record, good for seventh in the final Associated Press ranking.
I can still vividly remember the first time I knew we had won a once-in-a-decade jackpot by selecting Luck with the number one overall pick of the 2012 draft. At Andrew’s first mini-camp that June, he walked into his first huddle. He then called his first play using terminology no one else had yet learned.
By day one of practice, Andrew had memorized the playbook. After the very first play all the linemen looked at each other dumbfounded, asking, “Who is this guy? What’s he talking about?” But Andrew had the play and the terminology correct. It was just that none of the other players knew it yet.
He then started calling audibles and protection schemes that none of the other offensive players had heard of—and yet they were all 100 percent right out of our playbook. When the coaches told the other players that Andrew’s calls were correct, the players just smiled at each other and nodded their heads. That was when they knew it: Their quarterback—our QB—of the future had arrived.
Andrew excelled at play action, and he was as gifted as any rookie I’d ever been around throwing intermediate-length anticipatory passes. One reason for his success was that no matter what happened immediately in front of him, he always kept his eyes downfield—just like all the greats who have played the position. Even when he felt the pressure of oncoming linemen and was forced out of the pocket, he always had his eyes trained on his receivers. With Andrew, a play was never really over—another trait of the truly talented NFL quarterback.
Andrew also won over the locker room in record speed. How? I remember seeing him talking nonstop with Josh Chapman, a nose tackle out of Alabama who we selected with the 136th overall pick of that 2012 draft. When the two met for the first time, Andrew peppered his draft mate with questions that had nothing to do with football: What’s it like to live in Alabama? Is it fun playing in the SEC? What’s Nick Saban like? What do you like to do for fun?
And just like that, the two became fast friends.
Neither Andrew’s mind nor his wonderment ever quit working. I remember one of the first times he walked into Lucas Oil Stadium. He gazed up into the rafters, his eyes shining in awe, as if beholding the great Roman Colosseum for the first time. “This is so well done,” he said to no one in particular. “The industrial look is just perfect. Just perfect.”
On the second day during Andrew’s first mini-camp with us, I wore black shoes, black socks, and a black undershirt out to practice. I purposely walked by the defensive backs, who were out on the field stretching. Jerraud Powers and Antoine Bethea looked up and down at me and started laughing.
“Where are you going?” they asked.
“A funeral,” I replied.
“Whose?” Jerrod asked.
“Y’all’s,” I said, “because Andrew killed you yesterday.” The two laughed again, but they knew and I knew that, after only one practice, it was clear Andrew was going to be a topnotch player in the NFL.
There were times during that first mini-camp that I’d stand off to the side and simply watch Andrew throw passes on “the driving range,” as we called our separate practice field for quarterbacks and receivers. I was hypnotized by what I saw. Andrew would make every throw imaginable from every conceivable arm angle at every range of speed. He had, and used, every club in the bag, so to speak.
After practice Andrew would come into my office and ask a shitload of the most wide-ranging and most relevant questions about football. He wanted to know what type of play we would call in a range of specific down-and-distance situations and what he should look for in the defenses against our various plays. And once you answered his questions, you just knew he got it; he wouldn’t need to re-ask the question or worry about the situation any longer. When he knew something, he really knew it. Then once our football business was over, we’d talk about our families. I loved to kid him about growing up in Europe, being a soccer junkie and an architecture nerd. He was the most well-rounded quarterback I’d ever coached.
That doesn’t mean I wasn’t hard on Andrew on occasion, especially when he needed a talking-to. During his first training camp in 2012, he came off the practice field one afternoon after misreading a defensive coverage and throwing an interception in a scrimmage. “I fucked that up,” he told me. “Man, did I screw that up.”
“Why the hell did you do that?” I asked. “But listen, it’s okay, dude. Let’s move on. We’re learning here. Remember that. Every play is a chance to learn.”
There is a fine line in coaching between motivating a quarterback by yelling at him and having those verbal bombs napalm his confidence. Make no mistake, I can be a world-class screamer—heaven help the quarterback who falls asleep in a meeting or any player who takes my damn parking spot—but I’m always searching for ways to become both loved and feared at the same time.
It’s a coaching philosophy I learned from the best coach I’ve ever come across: Paul “Bear” Bryant.
In January 1981, when I was twenty-eight years old, I drove my little Pontiac Astre into Tuscaloosa to talk to the Bear. I had spent the previous three years as an assistant at Mississippi State, where as the passing game coordinator I had been a part of our 6–3 upset of Alabama the previous fall.
“Go visit with Coach for ten, fifteen minutes and see what happens,” Sharpe told me.
And so I did. I walked into Coach Bryant’s office and immediately took a seat on a little sofa, which I swear he had the legs cut off. When you sat on that sofa you had to look up at Bryant, which of course gave him a home-field advantage in his office.
Coach Bryant sat behind his massive oak desk, a string of smoke rising from a Pall Mall dangling from his lips, silently inspecting me for a few moments. Then the Bear said in his gravelly drawl, “I hear you have a way with young black players. Is that true?”
Coach Bryant knew that I had grown up with African Americans and that many of my best friends in the world were black. “Well, Coach,” I said, “I don’t know about that. I don’t care what color the kids are. Hell, they can be green, red, white, or gold for all I care. But I do know that I’m going to cuss them out if they screw up.”
“I don’t allow cussing,” Bryant said. “It’s a dollar a swear word.”
“Shit, looks like I won’t be getting a paycheck,” I said.
At that moment, I figured I had blown my chance at the job. But the Bear leaned back in his chair and smiled like your favorite grandfather. That smile—big and bright—could disarm anyone.
A few days later I was back in Starkville when the phone at our little ranch house rang. It was Mrs. Paul Bryant.
“Now, your name, Arians, is that German or Dutch or French?” she asked.
“It’s German, ma’am,” I said.
“Why, that is such a pretty name,” she said. “Paul is going to talk to you in a second.”
Coach Bryant then came on the phone. “The job is yours,” Coach said. “Come on over on Monday morning and we’ll get it all set up.”
I thanked Coach Bryant profusely and then hung up our rotary phone. Every young coach needs a big break, and this was mine, a momentous career changer. I now was going to work for the greatest college football coach in history, and I believed that this would turn me into a made man in the coaching world—if I kept busting my ass and quit cussing!
Then I looked at Chris. “Did you take the job?” she asked.
“Damn right I did,” I said.
“Well, how much are you going to make?” she asked.
“Uh, shit,” I replied. “I forgot to ask. I’m sure he’ll give me a raise from the eighteen grand I’m making now. I’m sure of it.”
A few days later I was back in Coach Bryant’s office. He shook my hand and told me I was going to earn $27,000 a year. I quickly called Chris and told her we’d hit the jackpot.
Chris and I went house hunting in Tuscaloosa. I had gotten a check for $3,000 a few months earlier for helping Mississippi State win the Peach Bowl. Now I planned to use that stash as the down payment.
We found a place that had a pool. The house was infested with mice, but man, we wanted that pool. I went to the bank and told the loan officer that I had $3,000 invested in a money market with a Mississippi State booster and I’d call to have it wired over to the bank. Well, the money wasn’t there; the booster had used it to try to save his failing business. The dude was bankrupt, which meant I’d never see that cash again.
Now I was in a bind. I was supposed to close on the house at 4 p.m. and I didn’t have the cash for the down payment. I called Bryant. “Coach, I need some advice,” I said. I then explained the pickle I was in.
Coach Bryant started laughing.
“This shit ain’t funny, Coach,” I said.
“You’ve learned a lesson,” he said. “Don’t ever give money to a booster! They’re supposed to make you money, not the other way around. But don’t worry. I’m on the board of that bank. I’ll fix it up. You go on down there. You close at four.”
So we did. Two years later, when I became the head coach at Temple and we sold our house, I discovered that there was $3,000 extra in the equity of the house. I asked the bank officer where the money had come from.
“Coach paid that,” he said.
“I thought he only got the note changed,” I said. “He never said anything.”
“Nope,” he said, “Coach Bryant took care of it.”
Just then I learned another lesson from the greatest there ever was: Head coaches must always look out for their assistants.
Beginning on my first day in T-Town, I watched Coach Bryant closely, as if he was more my kindly teacher than my grizzled boss. He knew everybody’s name in the building—from the janitors to the cafeteria workers to the secretaries—and could tell you their backstories. If a coach’s secretary was having a bad day, the Bear would detect it and stop at her desk to offer a few encouraging words. Her day would suddenly be brightened. It was magic the way he dealt with people. He could read faces and body language better than anyone.
He certainly could read me. After I had been on the job about two weeks, I got called into a meeting. The NCAA had just banned part-time coaches from recruiting, and one of Coach Bryant’s longtime assistants told me that I was going to become a part-time guy and therefore I needed to stop recruiting. I immediately walked down the hall and stormed into the office of Mal Moore, who was then Coach Bryant’s offensive coordinator and closest friend.
“Mal, I didn’t sign up for this shit,” I said. “Fuck this, I quit.”
I walked out of the building and drove home. Man, I was an arrogant young hothead. Thank God my wife was running errands; she would have gone after me like a shark after chum. With no one to talk to, I called Jimmy Sharpe and told him what had happened. He then phoned Coach Bryant, who apparently was on the golf course. Thirty minutes later Sharpe called me back and told me Coach Bryant was on his way to the office and that I needed to go meet him.
Nothing, I quickly found out, pissed off Bear Bryant more than getting pulled off the golf course. “What the hell is going on?” he gruffly asked me in his office.
“Coach, I take great pride in being a full-time coach,” I said. “Recruiting is a part of that. If this was the job you offered me two weeks ago, I’d still be at Mississippi State. I’m not a part-time coach.”
Coach Bryant slowly rose from his chair and stared at me intently, square in the eyes, as I sat on that tiny low-legged sofa. “I don’t speak out of both sides of my mouth, boy,” he said. “You get your ass in that car of yours and you start recruiting. You good?”
“Yes sir,” I said. “I am good.”
And that was the end of me quitting on Bear Bryant. But there are times in life when you absolutely have to stand up for yourself. There are principles worth fighting for. Challenging the Alabama establishment was a big moment in my career.
But it wasn’t like I suddenly became Bear’s Chosen One. After every game the entire staff would gather in the film room and review every single play. Then Coach Bryant would go around the room and ask each position coach how his players performed.
When he’d get to me, he’d ask, “How’d the running backs play?”
“Good,” I’d say.
“Did you watch the film?” he’d ask.
“Yes sir,” I’d say.
“Well, shit, son,” the Bear would say, “you must not know how to grade film.”
I’d sit there boiling mad, then I’d go into his office after the meeting. “Do you want number grades? Letter grades? What do you want?” I asked.
“You’re doing fine,” Coach Bryant replied.
But then the same thing happened the next week, then the next, and the next. Each time I’d follow him into his office and ask what he wanted from me, and he’d reply the same way each time: “You’re doing fine.”
&nbs
p; By the fifth week of the season I’d finally had enough. I went into his office again and stood my ground. “Obviously I’m not doing fine, Coach,” I said. “I want to know how the hell you want these guys graded. Just fucking tell me.”
“You’re doing a hell of a good job, Bruce,” he said calmly. “A hell of a good job.”
It turned out that Bear was just testing me. He knew I was cocky as hell and, in his own way, he wanted to bring me to my knees, which he did. It was brilliant.
Coach Bryant normally watched practice from his famous tower overlooking the field. Our running backs stretched right under the tower, and if we heard that chain jingle it meant Coach was coming down to chew some ass.
One day I thought I was about to get ripped a new one. Before practice I was going over film with my players when I heard a knock on the door. It was Miss Linda, Coach Bryant’s secretary, and she wanted to know if we were going to practice today. “Yes, we are,” I said. Then I looked at my watch: Practice started in minutes.
Man, we ran like hell out of that meeting room. The players quickly got dressed and we hustled onto the practice field. We didn’t get a chance to stretch; the horn blew to signal the start of practice as we bolted out of the locker room.
The kids knew we were in trouble. I was in trouble. And we proceeded to have the best practice of the season, because all of us were on edge. After practice was over, we stayed on the field doing drills. I remember running around with a blocking dummy and my players flipping me over their heads. Most of the coaches went inside, but some of the older coaches stayed around to witness this approaching ass chewing.
Then Bryant came down from his tower and rolled up to us in a golf cart. My players couldn’t wait to see me get my tail whooped.
