STARKVILLE — Landing in Blacksburg, Virginia, in the winter between 1977 and 1978, Mississippi State assistant coach Rockey Felker sat puzzled.
Arriving just a few miles from Virginia Tech’s campus, snow had begun to fall in the mountainous part of the South’s northernmost state. Head coach Bob Tyler and Felker initially headed to Blacksburg in hopes of landing former Hokies head coach Jimmy Sharpe for MSU’s 1978 staff.
But there was more reason for the trip than Sharpe. It was in Blacksburg and through conversations in coaching circles that Tyler had become smitten with a hotshot former Virginia Tech quarterback who’d spent the bulk of the previous three years on the Hokies’ staff as a graduate assistant.
“(I thought), ‘Who is this Bruce Arians guy?'” Felker said. “I guess, in my mind, I didn’t know a lot about him.”
Before Arians spent 28 years in the NFL with eight different franchises, before he teamed with Tom Brady to lead the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to a Super Bowl appearance in their home stadium Sunday, he was a strapping 25-year-old, sporting a youthful grin and a handlebar mustache, who landed his first major coaching job in a remote corner of northeast Mississippi.
Arians got his coaching start at Virginia Tech, but it was in Starkville that the offensive mastermind made his most prolific early marks.
“He was an exceptional coach, and I would’ve bet everything he was going to rise up in the coaching profession,” Tyler, now in his late 80s, said. “And of course he has done that, and, of all things, here he is in the Super Bowl.”
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Hired to coach receivers at MSU among other varying offensive responsibilities, Arians wasn’t exactly a down-home Southerner like the bulk of the staff.
Despite spending seven-plus years in Blacksburg, Arians’ New Jersey roots shone through in his accent. His players latched onto his unique wordsmithing, ensuring by the end of his three-year tenure in Starkville he’d adopted “y’all” and “fixin’ to” into his verbiage.
But the playful flak Arians caught from his players over his unique voice offered a look at the deeper difference between him and the military-esque coaches of decades past. He was a players’ coach in an era where those leading programs instilled fear and toughness rather than empathy and understanding.
Granted, Arians — fast-talking and gruff in words from time to time — wasn’t completely above the coaching fray. Future NFL receiver Mardye McDole quipped that Arians said “son of a b—-” in his general direction so much, he started responding to it as if it was his name.
“I would look around ’cause I thought he was talking to me,” McDole said, his laugh increasing with every word.
Arians was a meticulous student of the game in his early days. McDole, who became the first player in school history to record more than 1,000 receiving yards in a season, is quick to note Arians taught him to watch film. Every Monday, the pair met to comb through opponent game tape. Arians had already spent hours breaking down every possible twitch or misstep an opposing corner might take before relaying it to McDole.
Once on the practice field, Arians simplified the coaching process. He taught route running in progressions. On a slant — McDole’s route of choice — he broke the timing for a pass into a three-window system: First, when the outside linebacker stepped down toward the line of scrimmage; second, if the middle linebacker over-pursued into the box; and third, when the receiver had cleared all three linebackers and neared the opposite sideline.
“He corrected your mistakes,” McDole explained, “and it was in a way that nobody else had done it before.”
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Years before K.J. Costello’s magical 623-yard passing performance in Baton Rouge this past fall, it was Arians and a walk-on kicker-turned-quarterback who set the Southeastern Conference ablaze with his pass-heavy approach to the 1978 season.
Under center for the aerial renaissance that season was transfer Dave Marler. Marler, who played quarterback and kicked at Mississippi College for two years before walking on at MSU as a kicker, spent his first season in Starkville as a full-time special teamer. But Breck Tyler, Bob’s son, who held kicks for Marler and also played receiver, nagged his father that the team’s best arm resided on the special teams field.
Continuing to push his father on moving Marler to quarterback during a spring scrimmage, Arians overheard Breck’s insistence. He agreed. Turning to Marler, Arians offered him the nod.
“OK, kid, let’s see what you got,” Arians said. “Go in and play quarterback.”
Marler led the No. 2 offense on an 80-yard scoring drive against the Bulldogs’ No. 1 defense. A 75-yard touchdown procession followed the next possession. Arians looked at Tyler with glee.
“They put Marler at quarterback because the defense was kicking the s— out of us,” Arians told The Dispatch in October. “And he takes us right down the field and scored a touchdown and it’s like, ‘He’s our guy.'”
Facing a Bear Bryant-led Alabama team that hadn’t lost more than three games in a season in almost a decade that fall, Arians added a wrinkle in MSU’s offense the week of the game. Rather than line up under center and succumb to the Crimson Tide’s advantages in the trenches, he instituted a shotgun formation in which Marler lined up seven or eight yards off the line of scrimmage.
Running through pregame kicking warmups, Marler tore his thigh muscle. After a tape job and an injection helped him start the game, he was sacked and forced back to the locker room on the first series of the day. More tape and another shot followed. Riddled with pain, Marler soldiered through, completing 28 of 46 passes for 429 yards — the most passing yardage ever surrendered by an Alabama team at the time.
“(It was) kind of just like drawing plays up on the sidelines,” Felker joked. “… We weren’t prepared to run shotgun the whole game like we ended up doing.”
Though the Bulldogs fell short against the Crimson Tide, losing 31-14 after pulling within a score early in the third quarter, they captured lightning in a bottle. McDole, who finished the afternoon with nine receptions for 168 yards, concluded the campaign with 1,035 yards, a number that remains atop the school’s single-season receiving charts.
Marler would finish the 1978 campaign fourth in the nation in passing (2,422 yards), fifth in yards per attempt (8.4) and 10th in completions (163). His 2,422 yards that year also still sit as the fifth-best mark in program history.
“I had talent,” Marler said. “(Arians) taught me the skills.”
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Following the 1978 season, Tyler resigned from his post and was replaced with former Texas A&M coach Emory Bellard. Bellard, an architect of the wing-T formation, kept Arians on staff given his time as a veer option quarterback at Virginia Tech.
Arians would spend another two seasons in Starkville before Bryant hired him as Alabama’s running backs coach after the 1980 season. (He would return to MSU as Jackie Sherrill’s offensive coordinator between 1993 and 1995.) Always one to put players first, Arians called receiver Danny Knight, who he’d recruited the previous year, over to his house to inform him personally of the change.
Forty years later, after Knight retired from a longtime career as a probation officer last spring, Arians called to congratulate him.
“I’m just glad I know the man,” Knight said. “I’m just happy for him and proud of him.”
Sunday, Arians, Brady and the Buccaneers take on the Kansas City Chiefs with a shot at delivering the franchise its first Super Bowl victory since 2002. Nearly 43 years on from his flight from Blacksburg to Starkville, Arians isn’t the baby-faced, mustachioed coordinator he once was. But today, everyone knows that Bruce Arians guy.
Ben Portnoy reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @bportnoy15.
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