The Quarterback Whisperer

by Bruce Arians

  Andrew had a little bit of a wild-eyed look on his face, and the defense responded. They forced a Lions punt and then Andrew hit LaVon Brazill for a 42-yard touchdown pass with 2:39 left, cutting our deficit to 33–28.

  Andrew again came to the sideline and encouraged the defense to get a stop. They did. Then on the last play of the game, Andrew found Donnie Avery on a drag route—a shallow pattern across the middle of the field—for a touchdown. We won 35–33, and there was no doubt that Andrew’s attitude had as much to do with our victory as the beautiful throws he made in the fourth quarter.

  Andrew bloomed into a Pro Bowl player as a rookie. In his first year in the league, he set an NFL rookie record by throwing for 4,374 yards. He had Peyton’s cerebral and analytical mentality, Ben’s athleticism, and Kelly Holcomb’s grit.

  He was, to my eye, as close to a perfect young quarterback as I had ever seen.

  He was the kind of quarterback I wanted to grow old with—or so I thought.

  You carried the torch and all you went and did was win nine ball games. You did it with dignity and you did it with class. You’re everything that I always knew you were, and more.

  —CHUCK PAGANO

  CHAPTER 8

  THE YEAR FOOTBALL BEAT CANCER

  Chuck Pagano and I had been friends for years. I worked with his brother Johnny on the Saints staff in 1996, and Chuck and I coached together on the Browns staff under Butch Davis from 2001 to ’03. I was Cleveland’s offensive coordinator and Chuck was the secondary coach, and in practice my guys would go against his guys. We’re both extremely competitive, and we always brought out the best in each other on the practice field.

  We also just plain hit it off. There are a lot of assholes in the world of coaching—backstabbing is common and a lot of guys have personal agendas that don’t match up with the team’s agenda—but Chuck isn’t one of them. He’s a good, decent, hardworking man who is also a hell of a coach. After he hired me in 2012 to be his offensive coordinator with the Colts, we talked or texted at least daily, even if we had the day off.

  I’ll never forget that it was a little before noon on Sunday, September 30, 2012, when my cell phone rang. I was at our lake house in Reynolds Plantation, and Chris and I were preparing to head back to Indianapolis. We were finishing up our bye week. Our record was 1–2 at the time I answered the phone call.

  The voice was Chuck’s. I knew he hadn’t been feeling well—he complained about being more fatigued than usual—and that he was planning to see a doctor during the bye week. At first he sounded like everything was okay. In his normal, confident voice, he talked to me about a few football-related things. But then, as quickly as one flips a light switch, the tone of his voice dropped. He told me he had some bruises and that his wife, Tina, had made him go to the doctor. Then he softly said it:

  “I have leukemia.”

  Those words hung in the air for who knows how long. I was in a state of shock. Then, breaking the silence, he added, “Mr. Irsay wants you to coach the team.”

  Coaching was the furthest thing from my mind at that moment. Good God, my only concern was for my good friend who had rescued me from an early retirement. I knew he was in for a fight.

  Back in 2007 I had my own health scare. Just after we won the Super Bowl with the Steelers, Ken Whisenhunt, our offensive coordinator, was hired to be the head coach of the Arizona Cardinals. Kenny wanted me to be his offensive coordinator in Arizona, but then Mike Tomlin offered me Ken’s old job and promoted me from wide receivers coach to OC. If I had gone with Kenny to Phoenix, I never would have had time to get a physical. But because I stayed in Pittsburgh and didn’t have to turn my life upside down, I decided to visit my doctor. It had been a long time since I’d seen him—too long.

  A routine exam revealed that I had an elevated prostate-specific antigen (PSA) count. The doctor told me that too much PSA meant that I could have a benign enlarged prostate, or possibly cancer. He told me he was pretty sure it wasn’t cancer.

  Then he did a biopsy. He was wrong. I had cancer.

  I had to wait about two months before my operation. Man, that was a long and agonizing time, not knowing if the cancer was contained or if it had spread to my bones. To keep my mind busy, I reviewed every play in the Steelers playbook. The doctors thought the cancer was growing but that it was restricted to the prostate, so I underwent a radical prostatectomy.

  I remember waking up from the surgery, looking around and seeing no one—no doctor, no nurses, no family. Then I heard rounds of laughter out in the hallway; it was Chris, Jake, and Kristi. Then they came into my room with the doctor. He immediately lifted my sprits, telling me they had removed all the cancer and that it hadn’t progressed out of my prostate. Then he announced, “I’ve got six beers in the refrigerator. You can have one beer with each meal.”

  That made my day. “Thank you, Doc!” I blurted.

  I did have to wear a catheter under my clothes during the draft that spring, but I didn’t care; I was so mightily relieved to be cancer free. Once you’re told you have cancer, life changes. You realize how important your family is. You want to hug your kids more, spend more time with your wife. You realize how lucky you are to play a game for a living. After my cancer scare, I began speaking to different groups and telling anyone who would listen how important it is for men over forty—especially those who have kids—to get checked for prostate cancer. It might have taken my life had I followed Ken Whisenhunt to the Arizona desert and not gotten checked.

  My entire experience with cancer flashed back at me when Chuck said he had leukemia. I immediately slipped into the role of concerned friend. I asked him about his treatment, his doctor, his plan to fight the disease moving forward. I wanted to know everything about his chemotherapy—what was the dosage, how many treatments were needed, whether he would have to stay in the hospital. After probably thirty minutes of my badgering Chuck, telling him he was one of the toughest SOBs I’d ever met, and that he’d win the battle, we hung up.

  But deep down, I was terrified for him. On the flight back to Indianapolis I flipped on my iPad and hunted online for information about his leukemia. I learned about the treatments and the recovery rates and the doctors who would be caring for him. After reviewing all the facts, I believed that Chuck was in very capable hands and would overcome his illness.

  The next morning the team gathered for our regular 8:30 a.m. meeting in the auditorium at our practice facility. Chuck is as punctual as anyone I’ve ever met, and the players knew that too. At 8:31 Chuck wasn’t there; I could sense that the players knew something was wrong.

  Jim Irsay stepped in front of the team and broke the news, telling everyone that Chuck was in the hospital and wouldn’t be getting out anytime soon. Then our team doctor broke down the disease and explained Chuck’s game plan. The players were shocked by all of it. Heck, I was still in shock. But now I had a job to do. I never once considered myself the head coach; I was just keeping the seat warm until my good buddy got back on his feet. And that’s what I told our players: Chuck will always be the head coach of this football team.

  When I spoke to Mr. Irsay I told him I’d take the job as interim head coach on one condition: that we turn the light on in Chuck’s office and not turn it off until he came back. Mr. Irsay thought that was a great idea. We put a plastic covering over the light switch so no one could flip it off. I wanted the light to be a sign to the players that said, “You may be tired at practice, but your head coach is fighting for his life.” And I never allowed anyone to call me the head coach. Yes, I expanded my leadership role a little bit—I now decided if we were going to go for it on fourth down on Sundays and I addressed the players on Saturday nights in our team meeting on the eve of a game—but other than that the head coach of this team was still Chuck Pagano. I told everyone to just focus on doing their job, because that’s what I was doing. We weren’t going to change anything about how the locker room was run or managed. Everything would operate as it had before; onl
y now Chuck wasn’t around.

  At our first practice without Chuck, I told the players to gather around me. I never write down what I’m going to say in a speech to my players; I’m an off-the-cuff guy who speaks from the heart. I always try to be as truthful as possible—I’ve got a low threshold for bullshit—and I wanted the players to know that we now had our mission for the season: We were going to play for Chuck.

  I reminded the players that after every huddle we always yell, “One-two-three,” and follow that with a word or phrase of the day, like “win,” “finish,” or “work hard.” Then I said, “Aren’t all these things that we yell together really what Chuck is? Doesn’t he win? Doesn’t he finish? Doesn’t he fucking work hard?”

  I could see I had the players’ full attention at this point. They leaned in, their eyes intense with anticipation.

  “Let’s create a new tradition, right here, right now,” I shouted. “Whenever we break a huddle we yell, ‘One-two-three Chuck!’”

  The players roared. Instantly I knew our guys were going to fight like hell for their coach. And so would I.

  Our first game without Chuck was at home on October 7 against the Green Bay Packers. We put all of his game gear out in the locker every Sunday—for home games and away—and we downloaded every practice to his iPad. Chuck had every reason to live. Our goal was win enough games so he could come back and coach again that season. If that meant going to the playoffs, we were going to the playoffs—even though we had the worst record in the NFL the previous season.

  When Mr. Irsay spoke to the team on that Monday in the auditorium, one of the last things he said was, “Beat the Green Bay Packers and take the game ball over to Chuck in the hospital.” After those words flew from his lips, I said under my breath, “Shit, this is some fucking pressure.”

  So this was the second time in my life that I was afraid to lose a football game. I never thought I’d be as nervous before a game as I was when I jogged onto the field for Bear Bryant’s final game of coaching, but now that same queasy feeling of more than three decades earlier gripped me to the core as I walked around the field at Lucas Oil Stadium before kickoff.

  I spotted my son, Jake. We hugged, and then, grasping each other tight, we both started to cry. I’m not a crier—I hadn’t shed a tear since my father’s funeral—but now I was just overcome with emotion. My thoughts were wrapped around Chuck and the horror of cancer. Life just didn’t seem fair at this moment, and yet it was also a defining moment of my career. I was now an acting head coach in the NFL, my lifelong dream had been achieved, but I wished to God it had never happened like this. The emotions arose, rattled my heart, and leaked from my eyes.

  Jake was living in Birmingham. He had driven seven hours on that Monday to spend the week with me in Indy. He is my confidant, and on that first full day without Chuck I floated an idea to Jake: I told him I wanted to go no-huddle against the Packers.

  Jake—an unfiltered soul like his old man—looked at me like I was the guy at the end of the bar who had stayed one drink too long. “Are you crazy?” he asked. “You can’t do that in the first week on the job.”

  “But Andrew is ready,” I said. “No risk it, no biscuit, baby.”

  I’ve always believed that the quarterback needs to run the show, not the offensive coordinator or head coach. When I’d had special quarterbacks in the past—most notably Peyton in Indy and Ben in Pittsburgh—we’d enjoyed great success operating out of the no-huddle offense. To make this work, though, the quarterback needs to understand the offense as thoroughly as the coaching staff does. Peyton did. Ben did. And I now believed Andrew would too.

  But Andrew would only be starting the fourth game of his NFL career—it took Peyton and Ben years to be comfortable enough to run no-huddle—and so I knew he was going to make mistakes. But that was okay. One of Andrew’s greatest strengths is that he’s very good at forgetting bad plays. He learns from them and then erases them from his memory. It’s uncanny. Some guys have their entire careers ruined because they can’t move on from their mistakes. But not Andrew. He’s a great forgetter.

  During the week I told Andrew just to let it rip during the game. I encouraged him to take chances because I felt we needed to make big plays to have a chance at pulling off the upset against the Packers. And when I told him we were going to play fast and go no-huddle, his eyes lit up like the neon signs in Times Square—the exact response I wanted.

  But the game couldn’t have started out much worse for us. We missed a couple of throws on third down and fell behind 21–3 at halftime. Our guys were trying too hard. We all wanted so badly to give that game ball to Chuck, and I thought we played like we were scared to lose.

  In the locker room at halftime I sensed how emotional the players were. It’s possible for players to be too emotional—snot bubbles and tears don’t win games—but our guys were in a good state. They were just trying too hard.

  Plus, players perform their best when their emotions are on the edge. I knew this wasn’t a time for me to give a rah-rah speech. I needed to be the sober-minded one in the room. “Look, it’s 21–3,” I said. “We all can read the scoreboard. Now we just need to do our jobs and make some good things happen. Defense, you’re up first. Get us a turnover. We can build momentum and win this thing. There’s a lot of football still to be played.” Then I ceded the speaking stage to Reggie Wayne and Cory Redding—I always like my veteran leaders to say a word a halftime—and they really got the guys’ juices flowing.

  Early in the third quarter our defense did exactly what I had asked. Jerraud Powers intercepted an Aaron Rodgers pass. Then Andrew got hot. He threw two touchdown passes and scampered for another. With 4:35 to play in the fourth quarter, we trailed 21–19 and had the ball first-and-10 on our 20-yard line.

  To me, there is nothing better in football than when your quarterback develops a hot hand. It’s like a golfer in the zone—the hot quarterback can make every throw in the book from every arm angle. That was what Andrew did in the second half, and really it marked the true beginning of the Luck era in Indianapolis.

  But it wasn’t easy. At one point in the second half Andrew got hit so hard that I thought he was dead. He fumbled the ball but somehow managed to recover it. As he lifted himself up he congratulated the Packer defensive lineman on the terrific hit. Typical Andrew. More typical: On the next play he completed a pass on third down to move the chains.

  What did those two plays signify to me? For starters, that Andrew had the toughness to be an elite NFL quarterback. Remember, one of the reasons we picked Andrew over RG3 was because we thought Andrew, who is bigger than RG3, had a better chance at surviving in the NFL and would have a longer career. But it wasn’t just his stature that led us to that conclusion; it was also his toughness. Imagine being in a violent car wreck every week, because that’s often the level of beating an NFL quarterback takes week in and week out. And the thing is, the quarterback knows that the pain is coming, but he has to stand there in the pocket, keep his eyes downfield, and throw with accuracy—while expecting to get pulverized by 330-pound muscled maniacs whose ultimate motive in life is to rip your head off.

  Andrew displayed immense courage on this two-play sequence. He also showed resiliency, which is another hallmark characteristic of the elite NFL quarterback. So often quarterbacks, especially the young ones, will develop a severe case of happy feet immediately after they’ve been driven into the turf by a defender. They basically tell themselves, Screw this, I’m not getting hit again, and then they’ll take flight from the pocket at the first hint of danger. But not Andrew. The fact that he absorbed a monster hit on second down and completed a pass on third down to keep the drive alive revealed that he had the guts of a winner, that he was one helluva resilient NFL quarterback. The easy thing to do would have been for him to take off running or mail in the throw on that third-down play; instead, in that very difficult moment when he was in an ungodly amount of pain, he made a terrific throw.

  On our f
inal drive of the game, Andrew led us down the field, calmly completing short and intermediate passes. He was a surgeon out there, reading the Packer defense and dissecting it with pinpoint throws. He converted two third downs with passes to Reggie Wayne, and he scrambled for another third-down conversion.

  With 35 seconds to play and the ball at the Green Bay four-yard line, Andrew found Reggie on the left side cutting in. Reggie caught the ball short of the end zone, but he dove and stretched over the goal line to score the touchdown. We won 30–27.

  What a scene that was. Players fell to their knees and rolled on the turf after the final whistle blew. I hugged dozens and dozens of players, coaches, and fans. When I saw Jake, we grabbed each other again and we both started crying again. I told reporters then and I still believe it to this day: It was the greatest victory of my career, more important than even the two Super Bowls I was fortunate enough to win.

  The locker room was unlike any I’d ever been in before. This wasn’t just winning a game; it was our way of showing Chuck how much we cared for him, loved him. I told the players, “This is the greatest win in all my life. I’ve never been prouder of a group of guys than I am of you guys right now. Everybody was helping. Chuck was coaching his ass off up in the hospital for us. You know he was. We did it for him!”

  Reggie Wayne then gave me a game ball—the first one I’d ever received in my life. But that wasn’t the real game ball. After the game Jim Irsay drove down the street to the hospital to see Chuck. He gave him the actual game ball. I was still in the parking lot running the best tailgate party of my career.

  The comeback win against the Packers propelled us for the rest of the season. Heading into our second-to-last game of the regular season against the Chiefs we were 9–5 and had a chance to clinch a playoff berth with a victory. Only one other team in NFL history had won 10 games in a season after losing 14 the year before—the 2008 Dolphins—and our success was directly tied to Andrew’s rapid development, the players’ commitment to one another, and their compassion for Chuck.