Detroit Lions CB Terrion Arnold and the many lives he has touched: 'He's one of my heroes'

Terrion Arnold seemed distracted.

Arnold was out to dinner with the college guidance counselor from his high school and her family after Alabama’s win over Arkansas last October.

The Tide beat Arkansas in a close game, and Arnold had a sack to help stall an Arkansas drive in the second half.

He played well overall, but allowed a touchdown on a goal-line slant in the third quarter and when he caught wind of comments his head coach, Nick Saban, made about a sack he missed — “When a quarterback can take a major college football player and sling him off like a … gnat on a cow’s ass,” Saban said — he got agitated.

“Terrion saw that comment at the dinner table,” said Sara Bayliss, Arnold’s good friend and former counselor at Tallahassee (Fla.) St. John Paul II High. “We were at this restaurant that he chose. Absolutely sent him. I mean, he was already upset about it. Here, I thought it was my first Alabama game, it was cool. It sent him into orbit.

“So anyway, I could tell he was distracted, but we had a great dinner with him, he went back to his apartment and hung out with his family on homecoming night, cause they never miss a game. Next morning, before we leave town, we’re supposed to have breakfast with him. He texts me, he says, ‘Hey, I’m going to be a little bit late can you wait until noon? I drove to Atlanta at 4 in the morning to work out with my trainer. I’m not missing a tackle again.’”

Three times last season Arnold made the three-hour drive from Alabama’s campus to North Cobb High just outside Atlanta on the morning after a game to work out with his personal defensive backs coach, Oliver Davis II.

After dinner the night of the Arkansas game, Arnold and Davis held their usual postgame debriefing by phone, going over Arnold’s play in fine detail. Arnold told Davis he was ticked about the “cheap” touchdown he allowed and was driving over the next morning for a 9 a.m. workout, before Davis’ regular session an hour later with a couple dozen high school defensive backs.

When he arrived at the field, Arnold did a quick warmup, a series of ball drills, then worked 25 or 30 reps on the same slant he gave up for a touchdown, before high-tailing it back to Alabama for lunch with Bayliss and her family.

“He’s literally trying to maximize everything that he has,” Davis said. “He’s finally tapped into that mode of really being where his feet are, in a sense. ‘I want to maximize every chance that I get right now. I don’t want to wait, I don’t want to push it to the side, I want to attack it right now.’

“So it just, for me it just lets me know, ‘OK, this dude really loves football, and on top of loving football, he’s willing to put the work in.’ A willing player is always going to be better than a player that just, ‘Hey, it is what it is’ type player. It’s just the effort, bro. The type of effort he has.”

The Detroit Lions traded up to take Arnold with the 24^th pick in the first round April 25 in the 2024 NFL draft, enamored with his total package as a player.

He was the best defensive back on an Alabama team that went to the College Football Playoffs last season, when he earned first-team All-America honors one year after being benched for his inconsistent play.

He’s a workaholic who spent more than a year — before the two officially started working together — burning up Davis’ phone in search of ways to get better.

And he has a legion of fans back home in Tallahassee who swear by his affable personality and good-natured ways.

Terrion and The Janitor

Joe Biggs grew up in housing projects in east Nashville, Tennessee. When he was 5 or 6, he moved to a 20-by-40-foot house, where he spent the rest of his youth with his mother, father and four siblings.

He went to work at a family friend’s flower shop “at an extremely early age — I don’t know that it’s legal now,” he said, and eventually got a job at a local grocery store, where he gave his mother 25% of his take-home pay to help with the bills.

Biggs, the maintenance chief at St. John Paul II, is happy to share his life’s story with anyone who’ll listen, and for two years, Arnold made it his almost-daily habit to do just that.

Arnold spent his study hall period his junior and senior years tagging along as Biggs did maintenance around the school, not as punishment or because someone told him to, because he wanted to. He helped recycle boxes. He changed lights. Once, he climbed a ladder to nail a piece of plywood to the wall much to the chagrin of his football coach, who walked by to see his star player 8 feet in the air a few hours before a game.

Mostly, though, Arnold was listening to Biggs’ stories, lapping up lessons about life and not having any regrets.

Biggs told the Free Press he quit college for personal reasons when he was a senior at Memphis State. He urged Arnold to never let anything get in the way of chasing his dreams, like he did. Arnold took that message to heart.

“Mr. Biggs, he’s one of those guys like he just, you can almost sense it on him,” Arnold told the Free Press. “Like he’s one of those guys who’s been overlooked his whole life. So me just being able to just be there for him, learn from him and create a friend. Like Mr. Biggs is my true friend and I value our relationship. I’ve learned from him and he’s an encourager. He makes people feel good, and a lot of times he’ll sacrifice the way he feels for others. And just I’m that same type of person.”

Arnold, 21, and Biggs, 74, have a unique relationship, not unlike the one Arnold has with Bayliss.

They text almost daily. Arnold invited Biggs to Alabama’s game against Tennessee last year. And on Christmas eve, when Biggs was working his second job stocking bathrooms at the local police department, Arnold showed up and surprised Biggs with a gift — his No. 3 jersey from Alabama.

“He treats me like family, and I look at him as family,” Biggs said. “I just look at Terrion now as a man, and the first time I met him, I looked at him like a kid. I’m not trying to put him down or anything, I just saw a kid that had great potential. Great potential. And he works hard. He’s my kind of guy. He’s one of my heroes now.”

Arnold said that feeling is mutual.

"He’s the maintenance man, meaning that he doesn’t care about going in there and cleaning up somebody’s bowel movement, cleaning up somebody’s urine, getting on his hands and knees for that, or somebody litters, he goes behind them and just picks it up," Arnold said. "He never complains and I kind of get that same thing in football, and the life lesson that I took away from that was, 'Hey, man, just continue to work. Your time’s coming.'"

‘A unicorn’

NFL teams go to great lengths to investigate the prospects they draft. Some go all the way back to high school.

Bayliss said she spent four hours with a scout from the Los Angeles Rams who paid a visit to St. John Paul doing his homework on Arnold this spring. She had phone interviews with countless other teams, filled out a slew of prospect questionnaires and thinks so highly of Arnold she “wrote a five-page paper of my own on things I thought they should know.”

The Lions were not one of the teams who contacted Bayliss during the pre-draft process.

“I had to pay extra postage to send them (to teams) cause I felt like their questions were inadequate to encapsulate him,” Bayliss said. “I mean, I pretty much said I don’t know about the football, I’m assuming you have that covered. But the person, I don’t know, he’s just something. He’s a really good friend. He watches out for people when they’re down, he follows up on it. He really — he’s a quick, quick study. … He’s so thrilled and so grateful.”

Alabama quarterback Jalen Milroe, who attended the draft with Arnold, said the two hit it off as freshmen in the summer of 2021, competing against each other in pre-camp workouts.

Arnold asked Milroe how he knew what coverage Arnold was playing. Milroe gave Arnold tips on disguising his defense better. And the two have been thick ever since.

They went to bible study together at Alabama. They attended Fellowship of Christian Athletes meetings every Wednesday on campus. They cried together when the Lions traded up to draft Arnold 10 days ago.

“He’s family-oriented, relationship-oriented,” Milroe said. “He really cares about the people that’s in his circle and that’s all he cares about is really trying to uplift the people that’s around him. What he tries to do is shine his light on other people. Everybody he interacts with, he wants to make sure he left a great impact on that person and he’s the type to clean up the cafeteria if there’s trash left behind. He’s the type to shake the janitor’s hand and say thank you for cleaning up the floor. Like he’s a great dude and his personality is truly effective. He leaves a lasting effect on everybody he touches.”

That was the case at St. John Paul. Arnold visits the school nearly every time he comes home, and the school plans to retire his No. 3 jersey in a ceremony next week. Bayliss calls him “a unicorn.”

“You are getting such a gem up there,” she said. “I mean, he makes it happen. He nurtures connections and relationships because that’s really what he values in life.”

Davis said that was the case last October, too, when Arnold showed up for that workout the morning after the Arkansas game.

Some of the high school players Davis works with were congregating when Arnold finished his workout, trying to figure out if that really was the Terrion Arnold on the field.

“They’re like, ‘What is he doing here?’” Davis recalled. “It was just a good testament for them to see and I don’t have to sit here and tell them a story, they can just see it with their own two eyes. ... They’re going to be like, ‘Oh yeah, I know what it looks like now.’ So he really did something that was bigger than him by doing that in front of those kids.”

The Lions, of course, hope that’s the case in Detroit, too, where Arnold is expected to compete for a starting job this fall in a revamped secondary that also includes second-round pick Ennis Rakestraw Jr., free agent addition Amik Robertson and trade acquisition Carlton Davis III.

Oliver Davis said Arnold focused on the finer points of the cornerback position after losing his starting job as a sophomore, something Arnold calls his "Michael Jordan moment."

Last year, he was more patient at the line of scrimmage, played with better balance and better understood how teams were trying to attack him. He intercepted a team-high five passes, and made good on his goal of being a first-round pick.

This summer, Davis said his focus with Arnold will be on being less handsy downfield and fine-tuning the mechanics of the position, so he’s ready to compete for playing time at slot or outside cornerback.

Davis counts All-Pro safety Kyle Hamilton and fellow recent first-round cornerbacks Derek Stingley, Jaycee Horn and Emmanuel Forbes among other players he has trained, and said Arnold is deserving in every way of being in that group.

“What I’ll say that, that group all has in common is willingness,” Davis said. “Willingness to work on and improve, cause these are four- and five-star recruits. They know that they’re good. They could easily just sit on that and still probably be a third- or fourth-round pick. But the fact that they’re willing to come and put extra work in, I think that’s what kind of all separates that group.”

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Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on X and Instagram at @davebirkett.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: New Detroit Lions CB Terrion Arnold 'a unicorn' on and off field