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People who coach football for a living tend to have plenty of quirks, and former Tampa Bay Buccanneers head coach Bruce Arians is certainly no exception based on a pretty wild revelation about the fairly severe paint-drinking habit he had when he was a kid.
It’s pretty hard to top Jim Harbaugh when it comes to listing the most eccentric head coaches the football world has to offer, but there are still plenty of guys who can give him a run for his money at both the college and NFL levels.
For example, Dan Campbell kicked off his time with the Lions with a bang when he deployed a metaphor about taking a bite out of a kneecap during his introductory press conference, while Dolphins skipper Mike McDaniel cemented his status as a fan favorite during his first season in Miami by hitting a vape on the sideline.
Arians, on the other hand, comes across as a pretty normal dude when compared to some of his more idiosyncratic counterparts, but the man who proved he’s a consummate Football Guy by coaching while nursing a ruptured Achilles is no stranger to the mental and physical fortitude that allowed him to start at quarterback for Virginia Tech in the 1970s.
If you need any proof, you don’t have to look much further than a pretty unreal anecdote about what he subjected himself to in order to get to that point in the first place.
Why Bruce Arians drank paint before football games when he was a kid
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In 2017, Arians conducted what should’ve been a pretty routine interview with Sirius XM that went slightly off the rails when he revealed he had to have his stomach pumped on multiple occasions when he was growing up as a result of guzzling down a sizeable amount of paint.
Bruce Arians said on Sirius today that he had to get his stomach pumped twice when he was younger from drinking paint. That's something.
— Kevin Clark (@bykevinclark) July 12, 2017
It’s safe to say the explanation he originally offered will leave you with more questions than answers.
Bruce Arians believed as a kid that drinking paint made him harder to tackle in neighborhood football games so he did exactly that. Amazing.
— Kevin Clark (@bykevinclark) July 12, 2017
Thankfully, we did get some insight into his rationale when he got the chance to address the subject during a subsequent appearance on SportsCenter.
Arians is lactose intolerant, which meant he wasn’t allowed to drink milk or consume any dairy products when he was younger. However, his father urged his older brother to regularly consume “a big glass of milk” in order to “get big and strong,” which led his younger sibling to believe he was missing out on a key part of his diet.
The coach said he eventually fell victim to a brutal case of Child Logic when his parents were painting their kitchen, as he figured the white liquid they were covering the walls with was a suitable replacement for the milk he wasn’t permitted to consume only to learn that wasn’t the case when they rushed him to the hospital.
While you may think he would have learned from that mistake, that did not turn out to be the case.
Arians was also jealous he couldn’t have the pistachio ice cream his mom liked to keep in their freezer, and while he once again convinced himself he’d stumbled across an alternative in the form of a can of green paint, he discovered he’d been misled when he was taken to the hospital for a second time.
At least he was able to figure out the error of his ways before it was too late.