The Quarterback Whisperer

by Bruce Arians

  What made our charge to the playoffs even more unlikely was that we ended up placing thirteen guys on Injured Reserve. We’d have players come in off the street on Tuesday and play on Sunday. Sometimes I wouldn’t even know their names. One game I saw our No. 97 sack the opposing QB. I had no idea who he was. I looked around the sideline and asked what his name was. “That’s Jamaal Westerman, Coach,” a player told me. Then when No. 97 got to the sideline, I walked over to him and said, “Yeah, way to go, Jamaal. Great job!”

  We also had six rookies playing significant roles on offense, but we didn’t allow our inexperience to hold us back. Our team became a reflection of Andrew—composed, confident, expecting to win. That’s leadership. That’s what great quarterbacks bring to a team.

  In our next-to-last regular-season game we were tied with Kansas City at 13–13 midway through the fourth quarter. Then Andrew did it again. With time running out, he found Reggie Wayne in the back of the end zone on a third-down play for a seven-yard touchdown pass. We won 20–13, the sixth time in the season Andrew guided us to a victory in the fourth quarter after the game was tied or we were behind. We had punched our ticket to the postseason.

  Andrew finished the game with 205 yards passing, and in the process broke Cam Newton’s one-year-old record for most passing yards by a rookie quarterback (4,051). I was so proud of Andrew, and I told him so. But he genuinely didn’t care about the record; he just wanted to know who I thought we’d be facing in the playoffs. This is another trait of the great QB: He doesn’t linger in the joy of today; instead, he looks at what needs to be accomplished tomorrow.

  On the Monday after the win in Kansas City we were back at work on Christmas Eve—and so was Chuck. He met with the players that morning and they gave him a rousing standing ovation. Chuck had a wide, wonderful smile on his face as he shook hands and hugged the players. I’ll never forget that night walking to my car. I looked back over my shoulder and the light was off in Chuck’s office. I sat in my car for five minutes and sobbed. We had done it. Our leader was with us again.

  I honestly didn’t give a crap about anything else that season; I just wanted to get Chuck healthy. On Wednesdays and Fridays, when Chuck was well enough, I’d drive to the hospital and visit with him after practice. We’d review notes and draw up plays for the next game. There were a few times he was in pretty bad shape, but his courage never wavered.

  On the day after Christmas, Chuck was back on the practice field. I kept stealing glances over at him as he presided over the practice, and I could tell how much he was savoring being with the team again. When the thing you love most in your professional life is taken away, you realize you can’t take anything for granted. Chuck had been coaching football for twenty-eight years, and now I could tell he was soaking in the little things that most of us in the profession lose sight of—most notably the camaraderie and the fellowship that are present on the best football teams.

  With Chuck back on the sideline at Lucas Oil Stadium, we finished the regular season with a 28–16 win over the Texans. In the locker room Chuck was aglow. The players danced and hugged and chanted and then Chuck started bouncing up and down himself. You never would have thought that he had just spent three months undergoing leukemia treatment at the Indiana University Simon Cancer Center.

  “This man is one hell of a fighter,” Irsay said to the team in the locker room. “I wouldn’t want to put the gloves on to fight him right now.”

  “I’m back here because of every man in here,” Chuck told us. “My inspiration came week in and week out by watching you fight. You’ve given this city hope.… What you gave me was something that was better than the medicine the doctors could have given me.”

  To me, this was NFL football at its best.

  The next week as we were preparing to face Baltimore in an AFC wild-card game I started feeling lightheaded on Thursday. I talked with our team doctor and I eventually went to the hospital that night. I had an inner-ear infection and the doctors thought it was messing with my blood pressure. I was released in time to fly with the team to Baltimore on Saturday. That night I felt fine.

  But Sunday morning during our pregame meal I became extremely dizzy. As I was eating everything started spinning. Oh shit, this isn’t good, I thought. The team doctor came over and said he needed to take me to the hospital, which was across the street from our hotel.

  “No way I’m going to the hospital,” I said. “No way. I’ll call the game from the press box if I have to and not the sideline, but I’m not leaving the team.”

  The doctor then checked my eyes—they were fluttering—and he said, “You need to go to the hospital.” It wasn’t a request; it was a demand. I had never missed a practice or a game in my life before, but at some point it’s necessary to follow the advice of your doctor. Chuck’s recent cancer battle had taught me that.

  So I checked in. In an examination room the doctors initially thought I was having a stroke. My blood pressure was 220 over 150. At this stage Jim Irsay called and asked me if Chris was with me. She wasn’t; my wife was back in Indianapolis. “I’m sending a car with a driver to take her to the airport,” Mr. Irsay told me. “A private plane will be waiting for her to bring her to you.”

  Chris was by my side two hours later.

  Our offensive game plan was already in place. Our quarterback coach, Clyde Christensen, knew exactly what to do. Although I felt like a caged animal and desperately wanted to escape the hospital bed, I knew with Clyde calling the plays our offense was in capable hands.

  The doctors let me watch the game, which didn’t exactly help my blood pressure. We missed a couple of chances in the red zone for touchdowns, and that sealed our fate. We went down 24–9.

  I was released from the hospital two days later. The doctors never figured out what had caused my blood pressure to spike. One guessed it was the inner-ear infection, and another thought it could have been a migraine headache, but no one was 100 percent certain. So what. At least I was alive.

  Once I got home to Indianapolis I got a call from a reporter. He told me that I had been named the AP Coach of the Year, and that I was the first interim head coach ever to win the award. I nearly dropped the phone.

  I was shocked.

  I had hired an agent, Mike Brown, a few months earlier at the insistence of friends and family who encouraged me to “play the game.” But I still wasn’t going to change my ways. Never. You are always guaranteed to get the unvarnished, unplugged version of me.

  And soon after word of winning AP Coach of the Year got out, the phone began to ring, ring, and ring. Another door was about to swing open.

  You’ve got to love life in the NFL.

  I sure as heck wouldn’t want to be the third-stringer on one of Bruce’s teams. Bruce will MF him to death. But I understand that he’s really talking to me. He’s coaching me through the third-stringer. It works for us, though I’m not sure how the third-stringer feels.

  —CARSON PALMER

  CHAPTER 9

  CARSON PALMER

  My day in Chicago went great.

  At the end of the 2012 season, I was in our apartment in Indianapolis when my agent, Mike Brown, called to tell me that five teams were interested in having me interview for their head coach position. Only twelve months earlier I had been fired in Pittsburgh and believed my coaching career was finished. Life sure can be an up-and-down journey.

  It was during my time of filling in for Chuck as the Colts’ interim head coach that I finally decided to hire an agent. For years I had told everyone that I wasn’t going to play politics. In retrospect, this probably hurt me. My wife certainly believes so.

  “Bruce is incapable of kissing someone’s butt,” Chris says. “He doesn’t give false praise to someone to get them to like him. For years he didn’t want an agent doing that for him because he believed the results of his work should have spoken for him. But then Bruce got labeled in NFL circles as a ‘career coordinator.’ He kept getting passed over to even in
terview for head coaching jobs while young guys who have hardly any experience somehow got labeled as ‘future head coaches.’ It made no sense.”

  Chris and Jake really got after me to finally get an agent midway through the 2012 season. We were having success and we kept hearing that I might have a chance to interview for a head coaching position at the end of the season. So I eventually called Mike Brown, who represented Clemson coach Dabo Swinney, and asked him to be my agent. Brownie, as we called him, was great. He immediately sprang into action.

  “Bruce, we’re going to get a résumé together and we’re going to make this happen,” he told me. “Just trust me.”

  After the season Brownie set up interviews with five teams that had head coaching vacancies. At first I was most intrigued with the Bears. I traveled to Chicago and met in Halas Hall with the team’s general manager, Phil Emery. We talked for several hours as I detailed my plan of action for turning the team into a consistent winner. The most important thing, I stressed, was tailoring the offense to the strengths of quarterback Jay Cutler. Everything else builds on that foundation. I would have Jay pick exactly what he wanted to do—putting the accountability squarely on his shoulders—and then I would design an offense that would put him in a position to succeed.

  I met with Jay and showed him my game plan and my call sheet. We went through several plays and broke them down together. He had a great arm and nice overall talent. Plus, he was a smart dude—a Vanderbilt man. You never know what a quarterback will do until you’re in the heat of the battle with him, but just from the standpoint of arm talent, Jay had more than enough to flourish. He knew I loved the deep ball, and Jay could throw it out of the stadium.

  I felt really good about how the day went in Chicago. In fact, I thought the discussions couldn’t have gone any better. I also met with a few Bears front-office guys; Chairman George Halas McCaskey was great. I honestly figured I’d get the job.

  But you never know in the NFL.

  As I waited for the Chicago brass to make their decision, three of the five teams that had contacted my agent had already filled their head coach vacancies. Then the Bears decided to go with Marc Trestman, who lasted all of two seasons in the Windy City. I thought my shot at becoming an NFL head coach was over. The only team still interested was the Arizona Cardinals, but I was hesitant to interview for that job. The Cardinals had just fired my good friend Ken Whisenhunt, and I knew if I got the job I’d have to let go of all of his assistants, many of whom were close friends. Why would I have to fire them? Because a new head coach has to surround himself with his own guys. It only takes one discontented assistant to undermine an entire staff, and in the process that one guy can sabotage a season.

  So I called Kenny. “Hey, man, I got a helluva dilemma,” I said. “I didn’t get the Bears job and the Cardinals now want me to come out and talk to them about replacing you. I don’t feel comfortable coming to your city and firing all the guys you brought with you.”

  “No, B.A., you need to go and do the interview,” he said. “You’ve earned this. Go for it.”

  The following day I flew out to Phoenix. That night I met with owner Michael Bidwill and general manager Steve Keim at Tarbell’s, a Zagat Top Ten restaurant in the Valley.

  I like to think of myself as a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy. So many people over the years have told me that I’m no good at playing politics and that I was a fool for never having a résumé on hand to give out to general managers. And maybe that did hurt me along the way; maybe I would have gotten a chance to interview for an NFL head coaching position when I was younger. But I’ve always felt it’s important never to pretend to be something you’re not. Maybe that’s why I’ve gotten along so well with the majority of reporters over the years; I mean what I say and I say what I mean. With me, there is no sugarcoating, no dancing around the truth, no double talk.

  I’m pretty sure I dropped my first F-bomb in the meeting with Michael and Steve only minutes into our conversation. “Where the fuck are our drinks?” I wondered aloud. Later, Michael would comment that his first impression of me was that I could use the word “fuck” as a noun, an adjective, and verb in a single sentence.

  My loose mouth prompted a wry kinda shit-eating grin from Steve. The two of us are cut from the same blue-collar cloth. We’re both hardcore Pennsylvania guys, we both had parents who worked factory jobs, and we’ve both been around the game our entire lives. Our rapport was lightning-flash instant. He told me he was looking for someone with experience. “Brother,” I told him, “I’ve got a shitload of experience.”

  The next day we had a formal interview at the team facility in Tempe. I laid out my plan in detail and emphasized that we needed to bring in a veteran quarterback. “I’m not grooming a rookie,” I said. “This team is built to win now and we don’t have time to go through the growing pains we’ll all suffer with a rookie quarterback.”

  I also explained that I needed to bring in my own coaches. I knew several in the organization wanted to keep Ray Horton as the defensive coordinator. I had nothing personal against Ray—we had worked together in Pittsburgh—but it was important for me to have the authority to hire my own guys. I already knew that I wanted Todd Bowles, who had played for me at Temple, to be my defensive coordinator.

  I was particularly emphatic about hiring Todd. As I was pounding that home, Michael stood up and left the room. Man, I thought I had just talked myself out of the job, but the thing was, I only wanted it on those terms. When Michael got on the other side of the door I told Steve, “I told you before I came here that this was the deal.”

  “We’ll work it out,” Steve said.

  About thirty minutes later Michael strolled back into the room and told me I was the new head coach of the Arizona Cardinals. I guess he needed to look himself in the mirror before deciding to hire an SOB like me.

  I thanked everyone and then told Michael that I needed to call Jim Irsay. From an adjacent room I talked privately with Jim. He was ecstatic—I mean, as genuinely happy for me as my dad would have been had he been alive. Then I phoned Chris. She wasn’t crazy about moving to the desert—“But it’s a dry heat,” I reminded her—and then she quickly realized that this would be the last job of my coaching career. She couldn’t have been happier.

  I went back into the meeting room and accepted the job. About five minutes later, Steve and I got to work. Our first task was obvious. “We’ve got to find a quarterback,” I told him. “We need a QB the team will believe in and trust. If we can get this guy, I promise you we’ll have a good team.”

  We immediately went after Drew Stanton, who was with me in Indy. He reminded me a lot of Kelly Holcomb—smart, tough, and full of grit. I really thought he was going to be our starter.

  The morning after I was hired I picked up my cell phone and was astonished by the figures on the screen: I had 463 text messages and 295 missed calls. The majority, I recognized, were from coaches, and undoubtedly many were looking for a job.

  I tried to return every text and every call. Even though I pretty much knew who I was going to hire to be my assistants, I wanted to pay my respects to the other coaches out there who were still wandering in the dark. So many times in my career that was me—unemployed in the offseason and unsure of what would come next. It nearly makes you want to lock yourself in your house, pull down the shades, and just sit in the dark, not because you feel sorry for yourself but because you don’t know how you’re going to support your family. You just don’t know if a “next” phone call is going to come. The waiting—and the prospect of no job—can be excruciating.

  Every January before the Super Bowl I always attended the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Alabama. Even when I didn’t have a job, I would go and sit in the same hotel bar every night, talking to coaches and putting my name out there. At practice, I would take a lap around the field and talk to coaches and friends and let them know I would appreciate any help—break—they could give me.

  When I went to Mob
ile as the Cardinals’ head coach, I sat again in that very same seat at the bar and took the same lap around the field. I wanted all the guys to know that a lifetime assistant coach could make it. That’s also why I returned those text messages and phone calls. I wanted to give guys hope that their next job was somewhere out there, even if it wasn’t with me in Arizona.

  I’ll never forget the moment I became a fan of Carson Palmer’s right arm.

  The date was January 8, 2006, and the location was Paul Brown Stadium in Cincinnati. I was the Steelers’ wide receivers coach and we were facing the Bengals and Carson in an AFC wild-card game.

  I knew Carson was an extraordinary player. He had won the Heisman Trophy at USC in 2001 and earned the nickname “the Human Jugs Machine” because his passes are as fast and the spiral motion of his balls as perfect as those launched from the contraption of that name. A native of Orange County, he’s 6'5'', 230 pounds, and oozes California cool. When you see Carson you say to yourself, Now that’s what an NFL quarterback looks like.

  On Cincinnati’s second offensive play of that playoff game, Carson called “999 Seam,” meaning three receivers and the tight end were to run vertical patterns downfield. We were lined up in quarters coverage, meaning we had four defensive backs arrayed evenly across the field. At the line of scrimmage Carson saw our defensive alignment and made a snap decision: He would throw the ball to wide receiver Chris Henry, who Carson believed could outrun any cornerback in the league.

  Carson took the snap at his own 12-yard line, dropped back seven steps, and fired the ball high into the gray wintry sky. Oh my God, it was a gorgeous throw. I was standing on the sideline as Henry ran right past me, and I remember looking up at the ball and thinking it may have been one of the most beautiful passes I had ever seen. It fell from the heavens and landed perfectly in Henry’s arms. Carson hit him in stride. The ball traveled about 55 yards in the air and Henry added another 11 for a 66-yard gain.