Arizona Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians: ‘I thought we’d be 10-0’

The Arizona Cardinals were one of the NFL’s best teams over the last nine weeks of the 2013 season, going 7-2 down the stretch.

That finish wasn’t good enough to propel Arizona to the playoffs, as the Cardinals became one of the rare 10-win teams to have to watch the postseason on television.

It’s rare for a team to pick up where they left off the previous season, but that’s exactly what the Cardinals have done this year, reeling off nine wins in their first 10 games.

So where did head coach Bruce Arians think the team would be after 10 games?

“I thought we’d be 10-0,” he said with a wry smile as a guest of We Need To Talk on CBS Sports Network. “You never look at the schedule and think you’re going to lose one. But, I think with everything that’s happened to this team this year, our guys have galvanized and it’s kind of us against the world.”

That mindset has worked. After suffering a 41-20 loss to the Denver Broncos in Week 5, the Cardinals have reeled off six straight wins, including triumphs over playoff-contending teams like Philadelphia, Dallas and Detroit.

The team-wide belief starts with Arians, who said he learned the power of positive thinking all the way back in his college days at Virginia Tech.

“I had a very good coach my senior year in college, Jimmy Sharpe, and we were just below average — I was bigger than the center and the guard and I was the quarterback,” Arians said. “Every time we took the field, he had us believing that we would win. He had a plan, we believed in the plan.

“I got to coach with him for three years as I got started in this business and he’s one of the most positive people I’ve ever met.”

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