Insider: Reliving Bruce Arians' magic from 2012

INDIANAPOLIS – By this point, nine pink slips into a 36-year coaching odyssey, Bruce Arians and his wife knew the drill. Pack the apartment, load the SUV, hit the highway. Cozy up by the lake, pour some Crown Royal, work on the golf game. This time — January 2012 — was supposed to be the last time.

Arians had been in Pittsburgh eight years, climbing from wide receivers coach to offensive coordinator. He’d tutored Ben Roethlisberger from rookie wunderkind to perennial Pro Bowler. He’d won two Super Bowls and finished six points short in a third. After that eighth year, he’d sought a raise. Felt he deserved one.

Instead, he was fired.

Football, Arians surmised, was trying to tell him something: He was done. He didn’t have an agent. He didn’t have a résumé. He didn’t have anything to do but call it a career, retreat to his hideaway in Georgia and grow old with his wife. And he was good with that.

Then, on that long drive in between Pittsburgh and retirement, Chuck Pagano called. Chris Arians handed the phone to her husband. She knew.

“You’re going to take this damn job, aren’t you?” she asked.

He didn’t know it at the time — couldn’t know it at the time — but that was the call that brought Bruce Arians’ career back from the dead. Five years later, he knows where he’d be if Pagano hadn’t called him that day.

“I’d have a hell of a lot better golf game,” Arians offered Wednesday morning, chuckling. “I’d be at the lake, retired.”

Instead, he’s prepping for the second game of his fifth season as an NFL head coach, the job he’d always wanted but never could get. Arians was too blunt, too honest, too damn real. Franchises had passed on him for years. They couldn’t after 2012.

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Arians’ Cardinals arrive in Indianapolis this week to face the struggling Colts, his first trip as a visiting coach to the stadium he revived his career in.

“The place will be packed, and I’ve always had a great spot in my heart for that blue horseshoe,” he said this week.

The call from Pagano, then the newly hired coach of the Indianapolis Colts? It led to Indy, Round II, a fresh start and a magical, heartrending fall. It led Arians to Andrew Luck, the phenom whom by year’s end Arians would label “the best rookie quarterback I’ve ever had” — and yes, that includes Peyton Manning, whom Arians mentored back in 1998. It led him to that team meeting in early October when Colts owner Jim Irsay, fighting back emotions, stood in front of the room and told the players that their coach, Chuck Pagano, wouldn’t be there that week. Or the next. Or the next.

He’d be in the hospital. He had leukemia.

It led Arians to that stunned, silent locker room a few days later, interim coach to a team that was getting drilled at halftime by the Green Bay Packers, 21-3. “We were pressing so hard,” Arians would say later. He chewed them out. He calmed them down. He gave the floor to two veterans, Reggie Wayne and Cory Redding. Then he watched it happen.

Then he watched it keep happening.

It was Wayne’s orange gloves, sneaking into the end zone for the winning touchdown against the Packers. It was Vick Ballard, flipping end-over-end as he broke the pylon in Tennessee for the game-winner in overtime in Week 8. It was Luck, stalking the sidelines in Week 13, down 12 points with six minutes left in Detroit and not caring one bit, promising his defense, “You stop them and we’ll win this game.” So the defense did. And Luck threw a walk-off touchdown. And the Colts won 33-28.

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It was Arians, hoisting his hands into the air on that frigid day in Kansas City in Week 16, his Colts winners for a 10th time, improbably, impossibly, playoff-bound. Before all this started, back when Irsay had asked Arians to take over in Pagano’s stead, he told the owner he’d do it on one condition: That they leave the light on in Pagano’s office until the coach returned. A day before Christmas, the boss was back. The light was turned off. After practice, Arians sat in his car and sobbed for five minutes.

He’d gone 9-3 as interim coach.

What’s he done since? Won 41 games in Arizona in four years, been (again) honored as NFL’s Coach of the Year, lifted the Cardinals to the 2015 NFC Championship Game. The head coach no NFL team would hire has become one of the game’s best.

And his bravado still resonates in Indianapolis. Mention “B.A.” and players’ eyes still light up. They miss that guy. That magical fall has stayed with them.

“Great coach, players’ coach, kept it real,” says T.Y. Hilton. “He told the five-star players they gotta play like five-star players.”

“He’d talk trash to the defensive players in practice all the time,” adds Darius Butler.

Anthony Castonzo, then a second-year tackle, remembers Arians telling him before every game that the rusher Castonzo was matched up against that week “had never gotten a sniff of my quarterback.” Castonzo would laugh. He’d seen the film. That wasn’t close to true.

“I’d literally seen the film of that guy sacking his QB,” Castonzo says. “But that’s how he motivated you. He made us realize how good we were. Coach Pagano set that up, and Coach Arians continued it. It was the closest thing to playing backyard football I’ve ever experienced in the NFL.”

But his most indelible mark on this franchise came on the rookie quarterback Arians molded into a Pro Bowler. Luck faced impossible expectations when he arrived — he was the guy Irsay cut Manning for, remember — and, with Arians’ help, he met them. Defied them. By Week 4, Arians felt comfortable going no-huddle with the rookie, something he’d never done with Manning. By season’s end, Luck had the NFL’s rookie passing record, and the Colts had 11 wins.

The coach saw it early. As he detailed in his memoir, “The Quarterback Whisperer,” Arians wore black shoes, black socks and a black shirt to the Colts’ second minicamp practice. Luck had been with the team for all of one day. While the players stretched, he strolled right past defensive backs Jerraud Powers and Antoine Bethea.

“Where you going?” they asked.

“A funeral,” Arians replied.

“Whose?” they shot back.

“Y’all’s,” Arians said, “because Andrew killed you yesterday.” They laughed.

More: Bruce Arians dishes on Manning, Luck and more on Pat McAfee's podcast

“During practices, B.A. is as intense as any coach I’ve ever been around,” Luck is quoted in the book. “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.” To this day, he leans on advice he soaked up during Arians’ brief but stirring tenure in Indy.

Arians wrote that he was “hypnotized” by what he saw early from Luck. “Andrew could make every throw imaginable from every conceivable arm angle at every range of speed.” Five years later, that hasn’t changed. The two have remained close — Arians routinely texts Luck before games — and they grabbed dinner this past winter while Arians was in town for the NFL combine.

“He’s probably the best rookie QB I’ve ever had,” Arians said Wednesday. “Never seen anybody (lead) the comeback victories he could pull off. … He could be one of the best of all time with the right pieces around him. You gotta have a defense, you gotta have everything. It’s not just him.”

The Colts are finding that out the hard way. No Luck, no life. Seven days after the thrashing they absorbed in Los Angeles, they’ll host Arians’ Cardinals in their 2017 home opener. Luck won’t be under center.

Arians, thanks to that call from Chuck Pagano five years ago, will be on the sideline.

Call IndyStar reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134. Follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.