Bruce Arians doesn't care what you think about his unique coaching staff; the Buccaneers coach is doing it his way to help solve the NFL's diversity-hiring issue.
By Judy Battista | Published Sept. 17, 2019
TAMPA -- Bruce Arians approached one of his team captains during a training camp practice before the 1986 college football season and asked him a simple question: What are your plans for next year?
Keith Armstrong, a Temple Owls defensive back who was credited with one reception in his senior season, knew he had no chance to go to the NFL. He was going to go home, maybe spend some time at the Jersey Shore, then get a job teaching at an elementary school, bartend at night to make some extra money, and be an assistant for his old high school football coach. Armstrong's mom was a teacher and his dad ran a barbershop, and Armstrong had already done some student teaching to prepare for life after graduation. He was good.
"You've got a graduate assistant job here next year," Arians told Armstrong.
Temple was Arians' first head coaching job, and while the Owls weren't very good, it is where Arians' career first took root nearly 40 years ago. His proposal to Armstrong, it turned out, was telling about Arians' approach.
Arians, whose entire professional life has been guided by a mantra so catchy it could be a commercial jingle -- "No risk it, no biscuit" -- would not worry about what anybody thought. And he would be devoted to cultivating future coaches. When those two philosophies meshed, as they did in that job offer to Armstrong, they produced what is now in full flower with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, where Armstrong is Arians' special teams coordinator: The Bucs' new head coach might be the most important person working in the NFL today in the push to diversify coaching.
"This is the way I grew up," Arians said during a recent interview in his Tampa office. "I never saw color."
Then, he quickly corrected himself: "I saw it in the riots. Both sides of it."
More than a half-century later, Arians has very purposefully created the NFL's most diverse staff -- including two female full-time coaches -- and perhaps its leading lab for how the NFL might be able to solve its coaching diversity problem. Color did not enter his mind when he was putting the staff together, Arians said. He wanted the best coaches he knew, the ones he trusted. It is not an accident that all three of his coordinators played for him.
Among his many stops, Arians spent eight seasons with the Pittsburgh Steelers, whose late owner Dan Rooney was the driving force behind the Rooney Rule, which mandates teams interview at least one minority candidate for every head coach and general manager opening. Arians' world view was shaped long before that, though.
He was born in Paterson, New Jersey, and grew up in the blue-collar neighborhood of York, Pennsylvania, where his closest friends were African-Americans. He was a preteen when Philadelphia erupted in a riot in 1964, just a few years older when the country was riven by dozens of riots in the summer of 1967, including one in Newark. Then, when Arians was 16 years old, years of escalating racial tension in York came to a head in a riot in 1969.
The next year, when Arians was playing quarterback at Virginia Tech, his easygoing nature made him the natural choice to be the first white football player in school history to have a black roommate. He and that roommate, James Barber, grew so close that Arians would later babysit Barber's twin boys -- Tiki and Ronde, both of whom grew up to star in the NFL.
Arians began coaching as a graduate assistant at Virginia Tech and especially by the wunderkind standards of today, he took an exceptionally long and winding road before he was in a position to give the NFL a chance to fulfill the Rooney Rule's promise. That the NFL has struggled with the results -- especially in recent years -- is why Arians' efforts bear such close watching now.
"In the post Bill Walsh era, there have been a few coaches -- such as Dennis Green, Tony Dungy, Andy Reid, Ron Rivera, John Harbaugh -- who have stepped up and out to advance coaches of color," said Troy Vincent, the NFL's executive vice president of football operations. "But unequivocally, no coach has been more committed in words and deed to minority coaching mobility than Bruce Arians. Coach Arians has been intentional in providing opportunities through job shadows, internships, fellowships and hiring coordinators and assistant coaches. Enough cannot be said about the example he sets, except that more should take his lead."
In the past two hiring cycles, just two minority coaches have been hired as head coaches -- and one, Steve Wilks, was fired after one season with the Arizona Cardinals. This year, with teams desperate to find the next Sean McVay, eight coaching searches were accompanied by a lot of conversation about the perceived lack of qualified minority candidates with offensive backgrounds, especially those who had worked with quarterbacks. Five minority coaches lost their jobs. Just one -- Brian Flores in Miami, whose background is on defense -- was hired.
Not surprisingly, when teams ask how diversity can be improved, Vincent points to Arians as an example of what more can be done.
He was born in Paterson, New Jersey, and grew up in the blue-collar neighborhood of York, Pennsylvania, where his closest friends were African-Americans. He was a preteen when Philadelphia erupted in a riot in 1964, just a few years older when the country was riven by dozens of riots in the summer of 1967, including one in Newark. Then, when Arians was 16 years old, years of escalating racial tension in York came to a head in a riot in 1969.
The next year, when Arians was playing quarterback at Virginia Tech, his easygoing nature made him the natural choice to be the first white football player in school history to have a black roommate. He and that roommate, James Barber, grew so close that Arians would later babysit Barber's twin boys -- Tiki and Ronde, both of whom grew up to star in the NFL.
Arians began coaching as a graduate assistant at Virginia Tech and especially by the wunderkind standards of today, he took an exceptionally long and winding road before he was in a position to give the NFL a chance to fulfill the Rooney Rule's promise. That the NFL has struggled with the results -- especially in recent years -- is why Arians' efforts bear such close watching now.
"In the post Bill Walsh era, there have been a few coaches -- such as Dennis Green, Tony Dungy, Andy Reid, Ron Rivera, John Harbaugh -- who have stepped up and out to advance coaches of color," said Troy Vincent, the NFL's executive vice president of football operations. "But unequivocally, no coach has been more committed in words and deed to minority coaching mobility than Bruce Arians. Coach Arians has been intentional in providing opportunities through job shadows, internships, fellowships and hiring coordinators and assistant coaches. Enough cannot be said about the example he sets, except that more should take his lead."
In the past two hiring cycles, just two minority coaches have been hired as head coaches -- and one, Steve Wilks, was fired after one season with the Arizona Cardinals. This year, with teams desperate to find the next Sean McVay, eight coaching searches were accompanied by a lot of conversation about the perceived lack of qualified minority candidates with offensive backgrounds, especially those who had worked with quarterbacks. Five minority coaches lost their jobs. Just one -- Brian Flores in Miami, whose background is on defense -- was hired.
Not surprisingly, when teams ask how diversity can be improved, Vincent points to Arians as an example of what more can be done.
MIKE HOLMGREN'S QUARTERBACK COACHES GOT A JOB NO MATTER WHAT THEY DID. THEN IT WAS THE DEFENSIVE COACHES. NOW IT'S SEAN MCVAY'S TURN. Bruce Arians
Arians has been around the NFL long enough to know that trying to decipher the vagaries of each franchise decision is usually fruitless and often confounding.
"Firings are firings and hirings are hirings," he said. "It's always been a copycat league. Mike Holmgren's quarterback coaches got a job no matter what they did. Then it was defensive coaches. Now it's Sean McVay's turn. It's always been cyclical."
In Tampa, Arians came out of a one-year retirement to replace Dirk Koetter and went to work assembling an enormous staff -- 28 assistants in all, perhaps the largest ever constructed. There are two primary reasons for that. The most basic is that Arians likes to divide his training camp practices into two teams – giving rookies a lot of extra snaps -- and having so many coaches means there are enough eyes on all those players, while Arians oversees practice from behind the wheel of a golf cart that he uses to zip around among position groups.
The other reason is that Arians is trying to identify and groom coaches he thinks have futures. This year, he went heavy on offense -- there are nine coaches for offense, not including Arians himself -- because that is the current NFL trend. Not only does he want to cultivate future head coaches, he wants to have a stable of assistants ready to slide into open spots when his top people get hired away. Arians is essentially creating his own pipeline.
"I think it's good for the game," Arians said. "That is the best way to fix it. I just saw the inequality in it and tried to do something about it. I had talked to Troy a number of times. We said that's the way we're going to have to grow, we're slowly going to force owners to hire guys."
With no mechanism to compel owners to choose a minority candidate, Arians has focused on preparing coaches and putting them in a position to be noticed when the job openings come along. He started the effort in Arizona, when he told Michael Bidwell he wanted to hire a few former players who were interested in starting their coaching careers. The result is the Bill Bidwill Coaching Fellowship, created in 2015, which provides opportunities for recently retired players who want to pursue coaching. The NFL has had similar programs, including one named for Bill Walsh that focused primarily on giving college coaches the chance to work during off-seasons and training camps with NFL teams. That program produced, among others, Steelers Coach Mike Tomlin. But as the college season has gotten longer and NFL training camps have been shortened, there is little chance now for NFL teams to get to know college coaches. So, Arians came up with the program for former players. It is how he got Byron Leftwich to Arizona.
