Months after retiring as head coach of the Arizona Cardinals, Bruce Arians has found his next gig.
According to Richard Deitsch of The Athletic, Arians is expected to sign with CBS Sports as an NFL game analyst. Per Deitsch, the two-time Coach of the Year will join the existing team of Greg Gumbel and Trent Green to form a three-man booth.
Arians enjoyed an fairly incredible coaching career, working as an assistant for nearly four decades before finally getting his own NFL team in 2013 (after a stint as Colts interim headman the year before). As coach of the Cardinals, Arians went 49-30, reaching the playoffs twice and leading Arizona to a berth in the NFC Championship Game in January 2016.
Arians made clear back in January, weeks after announcing his retirement, that he hoped to work in broadcasting, telling ESPN that he had interviewed with Fox and NFL Network and had another audition lined up with CBS. Via ESPN, here’s what he said at the time:
“I want to be part of the game,” Arians said. “When you’re doing games, you do a lot of traveling — good, bad, indifferent. You’re in the locker room, you’re doing production meetings with players and coaches. In a studio, you get a broader perspective, maybe you can tell more stories. I’m probably a better storyteller.”
Arians has been intrigued with working in television ever since a brief stint calling the first Pennsylvania high school football championships in 1988 with former Philadelphia sportscaster Al Meltzer after Arians was fired from Temple.
“I loved it,” Arians said. “I went down and moms are crying, and I’m interviewing the moms on the field. I said, ‘You guys get paid to do this s—? This is fun.’ It’s always been in the back of my mind.”
Unlike ESPN and Fox — which have spent months seeking to fill vacancies on Monday Night Football and Thursday Night Football, respectively — CBS was in no desperate need of an analyst. With no turnover among their broadcaster ranks this winter, the network could have simply rolled out some version of its 2017 broadcast teams again in 2018. The fact executives decided to bring aboard Arians probably means they were pretty impressed by him.
Arians seems to have the skillset to be a compelling broadcaster, with a big personality and decades worth of football knowledge. He was a standout character on Amazon’s “All or Nothing” docu-series back in 2015.
Friday was a busy day for networks seeking analysts. In addition to CBS apparently hiring Arians, ESPN reportedly reached an agreement with Jason Witten to call Monday Night Football. Meanwhile, NFL.com’s Ian Rapoport reports that Jay Cutler will likely retire once again and could give the Fox broadcast booth another try, a year after abandoning the network with only weeks to go until the season.
Speaking of future TV stars, ex-#Dolphins QB Jay Cutler is expected to retire (again), as well. He may be coming to a reality show near you, as will his wife. And of course, there is the Fox interest to join the broadcast booth.
— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) April 27, 2018
