National Football League

Bruce Arians' success with Arizona Cardinals should come as no surprise

Published Oct. 2, 2014 8:00 a.m. ET

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Alex Marvez

Calais Campbell never had a head coach offer such a harsh assessment of his performance.

Then again, straight-shooters like Arizona’s Bruce Arians are few and far between.

Campbell had already emerged as one of the NFL’s premiere defensive linemen when Arians first took the Cardinals’ reins in 2013. That didn’t stop Arians from telling Campbell he expected more as the team got off to a 3-4 start.

“It kind of hurt my feelings a little bit,” Campbell told FOX Sports recently in a telephone interview. “He said, ‘You’re a five-star player, but you’ve got to play like a five-star player. You can’t be comfortable with just playing OK. We don’t win if you don’t play like a five-star player.’ ”

Campbell was understandably taken aback. Such candor usually comes from position coaches who deal with their players for hours on a daily basis.

Head coaches tend to coddle superstars believing that a soft-shoe approach will coax better effort while not damaging egos or straining relationships. Especially taboo is publically expressing disappointment in a player’s effort or identifying who made a mistake.

That isn’t how Arians rolls – and the Cardinals and Campbell are better off for it.

“It was true,” Campbell said. “It made me step my game up. I respect him for that.”

Arizona (3-0) enters Sunday’s game (1:05 PT, FOX) at Denver (2-1) having earned respect as one of the NFL’s two unbeaten teams. The Cardinals have accomplished this despite injuries that shelved two key members of the defensive front seven (outside linebacker John Abraham and end Darnell Dockett) and forced Arians to play backup quarterback Drew Stanton the past two games instead of Carson Palmer, who is battling a nerve problem in his shoulder.

Among the myriad reasons for Arizona’s early-season success is Arians’ ability to push buttons and bring out the best in his roster with an unfiltered approach.

After a season-opening victory over San Diego, Arians didn’t hesitate to identify rookie safety Deone Bucannon as the culprit who missed an assignment that resulted in a blocked punt. Arians said second-year safety Tyrann Mathieu, who is still rounding into form after reconstructive knee surgery, was “way too apprehensive” during a Week 3 win over San Francisco. Arians warned that Daryl Washington was walking a “very thin line” well before the standout inside linebacker was suspended for the entire 2014 season under the NFL’s substance-abuse policy.

And these are just the things that Arians has told to the media -- not to the players behind closed doors or on the practice field, where the critique can be even more scathing.

“With the way football is these days, maybe the younger guys didn't grow up with the kind of coach who hits you in the head with the whistle,” Cardinals center Lyle Sendlein told FOX Sports. “B.A. doesn't do anything like that. It is different now with how things are taught, but everybody responds to him.

“If I was a young guy coming in and somebody’s mother-f***ing somebody, you take that coaching and get better from it. You watch how the older guys respond to it and you learn from that. And older guys are going to respond to B.A. because he’s truthful. There are no surprises.”

Maybe the biggest surprise is how Arians managed to stay true to himself through 40 seasons of college and pro coaching. He’s unlike so many of his peers, who lose their way trying to be someone they’re not or telling players only what they want to hear.

“The truth sometimes hurts, but it’s still the truth,” Arians told FOX Sports in a telephone interview Tuesday. “You try to be as nice as possible about it. It’s not you I’m talking about personally. It’s football. It’s what you see on tape.

“If it stinks, it stinks.”

Arians said speaking his mind “is kind of natural for me,” stemming from his own playing days at quarterback. That background also helps explain why he has enjoyed so much success grooming others at the position -- including Peyton Manning, Andrew Luck and Ben Roethlisberger.

“As a quarterback, you encourage your guys and try to be vocal,” said Arians, who ran the wishbone as a senior starter for Virginia Tech in 1974. “That part of it was easy. The coaches I respected the most were perfectionists.

“I got after them hard, but these guys were my best friends off the field.”

Arians carried that outspoken style into his college coaching career. He was hired as Alabama’s running backs coach in 1981, when Cardinals special-teams coach Amos Jones began serving as a graduate assistant.

Asked by FOX Sports the most brutally honest thing Arians ever told him, Jones said, “When I made my first (film) cut-up, he called me a dumbass.”

“But he hooked me when he was saying it,” Jones recalled with fondness in his voice. “It has been that kind of relationship ever since. You knew if you screwed up that you were going to hear about it. But when it was over, it was over. There were no grudges. To me, that’s what set Bruce apart.”

Arians will admit he isn’t always right. An example came when he was Temple’s head coach in the 1980s and Cardinals defensive coordinator Todd Bowles was one of his players. Bowles had dislocated his wrist and said Arians “was the one who had to tell me that I was never going to play again.”

Bowles instead recovered to enjoy an eight-year NFL career.

While admitting he initially took Arians’ message too personally, Bowles said he shouldn’t have. That’s one of the reasons Bowles was excited to join him with the Cardinals in 2013.

“We always kept in touch over the years,” Bowles told FOX Sports. “It wasn’t a disagreement. He was just being very honest, and I can appreciate that.”

Bowles enjoyed a long laugh when asked how much Arians’ style has changed through the years. Bowles described a younger Arians as “ornery” and someone who could “make you feel very small” when trying to get a point across.

“He’s nothing now like was in his college,” Bowles said with a chuckle. “Back then, he had a head full of hair and a head full of attitude.”

Arians, who will turn 62 on Friday, admits he has mellowed.

“Back then you could coach guys a lot harder,” Arians said. “Times have changed. Guys who think I’m brutally honest now didn’t see me back then. You would dive into piles and grab players by the facemask and chew on them so they learned what you wanted to coach. Now, you don’t put your hands on a player. It’s totally different.”

Arians was voted the NFL’s Coach of the Year in 2012 for his work in Indianapolis serving as the interim replacement for Chuck Pagano, who was receiving treatment for leukemia. Arizona offered Arians its full-time position following his 9-3 mark with a Colts squad that had finished 2-14 the previous season.

“He’s got a great offensive mind,” said Bill Polian, who was the Colts’ general manager when Arians was the offensive coordinator for Manning’s first three NFL seasons (1998 to 2000). “He really understands how to move the football and create an offensive team that is highly efficient. He’s great with quarterbacks. And in many ways he’s a player’s coach because he has great respect for veterans and will listen to them.

“He’s really very up front with what he wants to do and how he wants to do it. There’s no coach-speak, no veneer. He tells it like it is.”

The experience gained with eight different college and pro teams between his Temple and Cardinals head coaching stints also helped Arians learn – sometimes the hard way -- that every player handles constructive criticism differently and that he runs the risk of losing trust if any comments public or private are taken the wrong way.

“It’s a very fine line,” he said.

But it’s one that Arians has tightroped in Arizona even with what Sendlein described as “a whole lot of volume and choice words.”

“Something I’ve always been taught is that it's better to be being yelled at than not at all,” Sendlein said. “If they’re yelling at you, that means they’re coaching you and think you’re worth coaching. That’s what their job is."

Based upon his 13-6 record since joining the Cardinals, Arians is doing his quite well.

“The guy keeps it very real with you,” Campbell said. “He treats you like family. You get used to that.

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