Bruce Arians is not happy with his offense, and he's letting everyone know about it. It's not often that you hear a head coach, much less a first year head coach, call out his own team as early as OTAs, but it seems Arians wants to give his team a kick in the rear.
"We're just not picking it up fast enough," he said via the Associated Press. "We're still not picking it up the way I'd like to — at all positions."
"I don't like mistakes. I really don't like mental mistakes," Arians continued, "especially if you made the same mistake last week. That should be corrected and in the books by now, and our receivers are not getting that done."
Running back Ryan Williams was happy to hear Arians' direct form of communication.
"Everybody’s accountable, that’s the No. 1 thing," Williams said. "It’s a respect thing. We used to have egotistical guys who felt like they couldn’t be touched and be able to do whatever they wanted to. So having guys like coach Bruce is able to nip that ASAP and we’re able to have a good, quality practice and sometimes that wasn’t able to happen because some guys were just doing whatever they wanted to do."
Normally, it would signal bad things to come for a first year coach to criticize his own team in such a direct and public manner, but in this case, it can't do any harm. The Cardinals got off to a great start last season, but it all fell apart. Arizona just isn't a very good football team, and they need to be working as hard as possible. By putting his team on notice, everyone in the Cardinals organization knows that playtime is over, and Bruce Arians means business.
