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By Aman Sharma
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Former Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Bruce Arians wants one more run on an NFL sideline, he told Jordan Schultz.
A hire would make the 74-year-old the oldest coach the league has ever employed. Pete Carroll holds that mark, having been 73 when the Las Vegas Raiders brought him aboard in 2025.
Teams hunting for a coach this offseason have a two-time NFL Coach of the Year on the market, though Arians stopped short of a firm commitment. He said the urge didn’t return until mid-September, months after a February open-heart surgery to fix an aneurysm he’d been tracking for years.
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Schultz shared the news on X. Arians stated that:
“This is the first time I had the itch again. I had no desire to go back. … After open-heart surgery, I have so much more energy.”
“Now that I’m all healthy again, I got the itch again,” Arians said. “So we’ll see. Never say never.”
His March 2022 exit from Tampa Bay came as health problems piled up. He moved into a consultant job, a role he no longer holds, and turned the team over to Todd Bowles, his longtime pick to succeed him.
He described the toll of that final season.
“I had torn my Achilles early in that season, and I was wearing these prosthetic high heels, and it threw my back out, and I couldn’t stand on the sideline for four hours anymore without a lot of pain,” Arians said.
Arians went 31-18 in three regular seasons with the Buccaneers, and his .633 winning percentage is the best any Tampa Bay coach has posted. The 2020 squad gave Tampa Bay its second Super Bowl championship.
He won Coach of the Year in 2012, going 9-3 as the Indianapolis Colts’ interim coach while Chuck Pagano was out, and again in 2014 after leading the Arizona Cardinals to an 11-5 record.
Retirement hasn’t stuck for him before. He walked away after the 2017 season in Arizona, then came back in 2019 to take the Tampa Bay job.
Arians turns 75 next season. Landing a job would also vault him past the Kansas City Chiefs’ Andy Reid, 68, as the NFL’s oldest active coach.
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