Archie Manning remembers Kellen Moore coming to the Manning Passing Academy at Thibodaux, Louisiana, as a counselor during the summer of 2010, just before Moore’s junior season at Boise State.
Moore had just turned 22. But, said Manning, “He looked like he was 12.”
“I remember him as a really nice, polite kid, a left-hander” Manning said. “He was a coach’s son. His daddy was a legendary high school coach in Washington (state). I remember that he didn’t have the arm strength that a lot of the quarterbacks we bring in have. He wasn’t a big guy, but he was really accurate and he knew where to go with the ball. He impressed me as being really, really smart, ahead of the game. As so many coaches’ sons do, he really understood the game.
“I don’t know how much he got from us, but he must have enjoyed the camp and gotten something out of it because he came back the next year.”
Yes, and Moore has enjoyed south Louisiana a lot lately. Sunday, in the Superdome, he called the plays for the Philadelphia Eagles in their Super Bowl trouncing of the two-time defending NFL champion Kansas City Chiefs. He was back in the Crescent City Wednesday to start his new job as head coach of the New Orleans Saints.
Fixing the Saints will be much more difficult than torching the Chiefs, and we will get to that shortly. But first some more background on Moore, who will not turn 37 until July. Most college football fans will remember Moore for his remarkable four-year run as the starting quarterback at Boise. After redshirting as a freshman, he led the Broncos to a ridiculous 50-3 record over the next four seasons 2008-11. Southern Miss fans should recall that in 2008, Moore’s freshman season, Boise State came to Hattiesburg and trounced a good Jeff Bower-coached Southern Miss team 24-7. For his Boise career, he completed 70% of his passes for nearly 15,000 yards. He threw for 142 touchdowns, compared to just 28 interceptions. Clearly, he was really accurate and did know where to go with the football, which was quite often into the end zone.
Despite all those gaudy statistics, Moore was not drafted. He wasn’t quite six feet tall and, again, he lacked elite arm strength. He signed as a free agent with the Detroit Lions and played sparingly over six NFL seasons with the Lions and the Cowboys, retiring in 2017.
The Cowboys, who saw firsthand Moore’s football knowledge, hired him in 2018 as their quarterbacks coach. In 2019, at age 32 he was promoted to offensive coordinator. He has also served, successfully, as offensive coordinator of the San Diego Chargers (2023) and, of course, the Eagles last season. Perhaps the best way to put into perspective his contributions to the Eagles’ championship run is this: In 2023, Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts threw 15 interceptions and had a passer rating of 89.1. Under Moore, Hurts threw just five interceptions and had a passer rating of 103.7. That’s a huge, huge jump.
No doubt, naysayers will point out that calling successful plays with Hurts throwing and running, A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith catching, and Saquon Barkley running should not be confused with inventing the wheel. And those same critics will correctly say Moore won’t have that many highly skilled weapons to work with in New Orleans. (He also will not have the same quality offensive line wearing black and gold as he had wearing green and silver.)
Other critics will question whether a guy who will have just turned 37 when the 2025 Saints begin training camp will have the experience (both football- and management-wise) to command an NFL coaching staff and football team. And, frankly, given the choice I probably would have at least gauged the interest of highly successful Baltimore Ravens’ offensive coordinator Todd Monken before hiring a guy 23 years younger and with far less experience, none as a head coach.
But we all know Sean McVay coached the Los Angeles Rams to the Super Bowl at age 32 and won it all at age 36. You don’t have to have a gray beard to coach football. That said, Moore is only a year older than Saints defensive stars Demario Davis and Cam Jordan. A bigger problem for Moore is that the league’s youngest head coach will inherit one of the league’s oldest rosters. At the risk of mixing cliches, the Saints are as long in the tooth as their new coach is wet behind the ears.
Manning, who still closely watches his hometown team, put it this way: “Kellen’s got his hands full. The Saints have some issues.”
The biggest of those: The Saints are a league-worst $54 million over the NFL salary cap. Some of those salaries must be slashed or eliminated. The league’s youngest head coach faces huge decisions, beginning with what to do about quarterback. Go with Derek Carr? Or start over and go younger? The Saints do have the ninth pick of the upcoming draft. That’s just for starters. As Manning put it, the Saints have issues, as in plural. It’s hard to get a whole lot better while chopping the payroll so drastically.
This all will be interesting to watch. And we should all remember what happened the last time the Saints hired a young, former Dallas Cowboys offensive coordinator as their young head coach. Sean Payton, like Moore, had never been a head coach before he took the Saints job. That worked out pretty well, did it not?
The post Kellen Moore, now the NFL’s youngest head coach, inherits an aging Saints roster appeared first on Mississippi Today.