Former Super Bowl champion head coach pinpoints biggest reason young QBs either succeed or fail

Bruce Arians is uniquely qualified to discuss elite quarterbacks. Arians, after all, worked alongside Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Ben Roethlisberger and Andrew Luck during his lengthy NFL career that included three Super Bowl wins: two as an assistant coach with the Pittsburgh Steelers and a third as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers‘ head coach at the end of the 2020 season. 

While every quarterback has different skill sets, the great ones share the same ability, according to Arians. That one ability, Arians feels, is the separator between average, good and great quarterbacks. 

“After all my years in the NFL, I think [that] the No. 1 indicator of whether players in general and quarterbacks in particular will succeed or fail: how they handle failure,” Arians wrote in a story for The Athletic. 

Arians went on to offer two examples of when two of his former quarterbacks — Luck and Manning — responded to adversity. 

Regarding Luck, Arians shared a pre-draft meeting when Luck showcased his ability to stand his ground, even if that meant correcting a possible future employer. 

“Andrew was the best player in the draft,” Arians recalled, “but I wanted to see what he was made of, so we put in some plays, ran them out on the field, then came back to a meeting room to talk. I said to him: “OK, put 62 Y Choice up on the board” — it was a play we had just put in earlier that day. Andrew started diagramming the play and breaking it down. Then I cut him off:  ‘That’s not what I said.’

“Andrew didn’t hesitate a beat, man. He fired right back: ‘That’s exactly what you said.’ And it was; he was right. I chuckled and said, ‘OK, man, you got me. I’m trying to check you out.’ I just wanted to test him, to see if he had the fortitude to know he was right and stick up for himself. He put a fork in that real quick.

“I knew then that when tough times came — and they always do for young quarterbacks — he could handle it. It wouldn’t crumble him.”

Over a dozen years earlier, Arians had served as Manning’s first NFL offensive coordinator. While it was a trying year for Manning (his 28 picks that year are still the most ever by a rookie quarterback), Arians praised the future Hall of Famer’s ability to make the most out of any situation. 

Arians recalled a situation late in Manning’s second game, when the Colts were in the midst of a blowout loss to the New England Patriots. Manning, who threw three picks in his first NFL start a week earlier, had already thrown three picks against New England, who had built a 29-0 lead. 

“We were getting smoked 29-0,” Arians wrote. “But I told him: ‘Stay in there. We’re going to run the two-minute offense. Let’s learn something.’ Sure enough, late in the game, he drove us down the field and scored a touchdown. 

“We still lost, of course, but he hung in there. He learned. My point is: You never, ever saw him down on himself. It was always: ‘How am I going to get better? Let’s get better. Let’s work, work, work.’ That was his mentality. And that’s the mentality anyone needs to successfully deal with failure.”

While seemingly everyone is focused on height, hand size, and arm strength, Arians instead feels that the true measure of a great quarterback is how they handle adversity when it inevitably arrives. 

While it may or may not lead to a successful NFL career, the resilience that Will Howard showed during his final four games at Ohio State ultimately led to him getting selected by the Steelers in the sixth round of this year’s draft. After playing poorly in a late-season loss to Michigan, Howard responded by playing lights out in the College Football Playoff. His play during those games helped Ohio State capture a national championship. 

“How he responded to that adversity at the end of their regular season, and the leadership, and playmaking that he displayed throughout the playoffs was really attractive and is really what NFL football is about,” Tomlin said about Howard after drafting him, via Sports Illustrated. “There’s going to be some adversity, how you respond to it defines you and your football team particularly from the quarterback position.”