Still coaching at 84, Tom Moore’s next stop is Pro Football Hall of Fame
In the trophy room of his forever home in Hilton Head, S.C., Tom Moore has a picture of himself and Peyton Manning as the Colts quarterback receives the AFC Player of the Year Award from the Kansas City Committee of 101.
Manning left a hand-written note on the photograph:
Tom, Thanks for all you’ve done for me. You are the best coach in football and I will forever be indebted to you.
Manning isn’t alone. Although Moore is quick to say he has been fortunate to coach some great quarterbacks — from Terry Bradshaw to Manning to even Tom Brady — a lot of players, head coaches and organizations owe the Bucs offensive consultant more than gratitude.
At 84, Moore still routinely arrives to work before anyone on the coaching staff and isn’t finished with a career that has included 24 playoff appearances, five trips to the Super Bowl and four world championships in 45 NFL seasons.
“There’s got to be some guardian angels who have watched over me,” Moore said. “People don’t understand what it’s like when you’re 84 unless you’ve been 84 and able to get up and have a job to go to work. They don’t understand how great a feeling that is. … I’ve been very lucky.”
Because of his outstanding career, primarily as a play-caller, Moore is among three assistant coaches who will receive the Award of Excellence at the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
The program, which was launched last year, honors 17 individuals that includes assistant coaches, trainers, equipment managers, and public relations managers each season; they will be recognized Wednesday and Thursday in Canton, Ohio.
“I’m very humbled. I’ve been around great players,” Moore said. “I go to the Pro Football Hall of Fame and there’s a lot of people in there I’ve been associated with. There’s about 20 of them from Pittsburgh. You tell me. Someone is looking out for me. I believe that.”
The quarterback connection
Few have accomplished as much in the league as Moore, who began his NFL coaching career with the Steelers (1977-89) and had stops with the Vikings (1990-93), Lions (1994-96), Saints (1997), Colts (1998-2010), Jets (2011), Titans (2012), Cardinals (2013-17) and Bucs (2019-present).
After winning two Super Bowl rings with the Steelers as the receivers coach and later the offensive coordinator for Chuck Noll, Moore gained a lot of notoriety for his development of Manning. They met at the NFL combine in 1998 and Moore basically ran Manning’s pro workout at Tennessee in Knoxville. Shortly after the Colts drafted Manning No. 1 overall, Moore hid him out at the Signature Inn in Indianapolis, pulled the blinds in the hotel room and spent three days teaching him the offense.
Manning led the NFL with 28 interceptions as a rookie, the most in league history at the time, as the Colts went 3-13. But Moore made sure he was protected and the next season Manning led the Colts to a 13-3 record.
“I had great trust in Tom,’' Manning said. “I liked him from the start and he coached me and encouraged me during my rookie year, which was a struggle. But his whole theme of my rookie year was he wanted to protect me so he kept a lot of two tight ends in to block. Sometimes, maybe we ran two receivers out in the pattern and maybe nobody was open and instead of throwing it away, I was still throwing it into tight windows and threw a lot of interceptions but I wasn’t getting hit a lot. I think that was his main goal. He’d seen quarterbacks come in and get the crap knocked out of them and they kind of lose their confidence and don’t step into their throws and they never get it back. It was a plan that he was going to stick to and we went from 3-13 my rookie year to 13-3 the next year because I kind of figured out when to throw it away and how to make better decisions. So I appreciate that approach.
“I felt like Tom always had answers for me, the plays that he called. I think as a quarterback, that’s a great word to have. I have answers. He had a lot of sayings. It was always about players, not plays. He knew the things our players did well. He knew we had some smart players. He was very stubborn about some of the things he believed in.’'
Even though the Colts had other Pro Football Hall of Fame players such as Edgerrin James and Marvin Harrison, it was Moore’s offense orchestrated by Manning that enabled the Colts to be the league’s best in points per game (26.1), passing yards (261.9) and passing touchdowns (407) for 13 years.
“Tom could call the play and I could cut him off at the beginning because I knew what he wanted,’' Manning said. “Tom called plays but he gave me the freedom to audible. He also gave me the freedom that if I pointed to my chest, that meant, ‘I got it.’ He would wave and say, ‘You got it.’ He used to tell me, ‘Hey, Payton, if you see something, you go with it. And if it doesn’t work, I’ll take the blame for it. I’ve got your back.’ I think Tom said (Steelers coach) Chuck Noll told one of this quarterbacks, Bubby Brister, “Hey, you can audible, but it better work.’ That’s not really trust, that’s more of a threat. But Tom meant that.
“There was never a time I surprised Tom with a play call of mine or an audible because we’d talked about what we liked if the defense ever does this. You’re in a situation where you’re waiting for this team to play this one defense and they finally get to it in the third quarter and Tom is like, ‘Hey, if you see it, let’s get to that play because we may never see it again. And that was a real advantage. He said, ‘You have the best view of anybody out there.’ I felt like I earned that trust and respect. That wasn’t the case right away. It took me a few years to earn that.
The Colts won 141 regular-season games, two fewer than their rival Patriots with Brady.
“It was fun to think back on those games. They made each other better,” Moore said of Manning and Brady. “Peyton did all these things at the line of scrimmage, and pretty soon, Brady was doing it, too. I don’t know if they gave it to him, but he took it. You had to ... (let Manning) call plays at the line of scrimmage because that’s how he was going to be at his best.
“Some quarterbacks don’t want it. I told Peyton this. ‘If you call it and it doesn’t work, blame me. I’ve had my ass chewed out by a lot of people.’ But I knew this, he wasn’t going to make many mistakes.”
‘Tom knows talent’
Great players help make great coaches and Moore has had his share. He coached receivers in his first job at Pittsburgh where he had Lynn Swann and John Stallworth.
“When I look at Tom’s career, he’s been consistent in terms of his personality and approach to the game,” Swann said. “He’s a great student of the game and a great teacher of the game. Tom knows talent. He judges talent extremely well so he’s a reliable voice that coaches have leaned in terms of who they might draft. … He made me and John Stallworth better players.”
As an offensive coordinator in Detroit, he coached running back Barry Sanders. Bradshaw, Manning and Brady headline the quarterbacks. But Moore also had enormous success while with the Steelers coaching Bubby Brister and with the Lions directing Scott Mitchell.
Brister started only one season at Division I-AA Northeast Louisiana (now Louisiana-Monroe), but Moore took a liking to him at the NFL combine.
“Tom came and ate dinner with me at the combine and told me he liked the way I played and said, ‘If I get a chance, I’m going to draft you,’ ” Brister said. “He gave me the confidence I would have success going and playing in that league.”
In 1989, the Steelers got blasted 51-0 by the Browns and 41-10 by the Bengals to start the season. They rebounded to finish 9-7 before upsetting Houston in overtime in the AFC wild-card game. The next week, they fell 24-23 at Denver. Brister said he was crushed when Moore left the Steelers to join the Vikings as an assistant head coach.
“When he left, it hurt a lot,” Brister said. “It set me back. We’d been together in the same system. It was a crusher.”
Brister will be attending this week’s celebration for Moore. “He is very deserving,” Brister said. “I’d ride a bicycle to be in Canton with him.”
A full coaching life
Moore had a hardscrabble life growing up in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. His father was a “gandy dancer,” or section hand, who laid and maintained railroad tracks, working six days a week. His mother was a nurse.
An outstanding athlete who played football and basketball and ran track, Moore spent his fall Saturdays watching Iowa play football; he worked odd jobs to scrape up enough money for a ticket or found a way to sneak into the stadium.
“I’ve been cold, I’ve been hungry,” Moore said. “I’ve taken baths in a washtub where you have to heat the water. I’ve done all that stuff. And I’ve done everything I could do. My dad told me, ‘I can’t afford to send you to college.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll get a scholarship.’ ... So I’m fortunate.”
Football has been at the center of his life from the start. He was a grad assistant at Iowa, coached in the Army, got his first job at Dayton for $6,000 a year and spent time at Wake Forest, Georgia Tech and Minnesota, where he recruited and coached a quarterback named Tony Dungy.
Moore’s coaching career appeared to be winding down after he worked as a consultant for the Jets (2011) and Titans (2012). Twice, Bruce Arians — who didn’t become an NFL head coach until he was 61 when he was hired by the Cardinals — added Moore to his staff. First, he hired Moore as an assistant head coach in Arizona (2013-17), then brought him to the Bucs as an offensive assistant in 2019.
“I learned so much being the quarterbacks coach with Indianapolis with (Moore),” Arians said. “He has an unbelievable ability to simplify things that are complicated. Tom gave quarterbacks a lot of freedom, the ones who could handle it.
“I was in Pittsburgh and we were playing Jacksonville. I saw Tom in the lobby of the hotel and he just had both knees replaced. He said he never felt better. He said, ‘I just need a job.’ I told him, ‘If I ever get a damn head coaching job, you’ve got one with me.’ ”
The only thing missing from Moore’s resume is that he was never hired as a college or NFL head coach. He interviewed for jobs at the University of Minnesota and with the Lions, when they opted to go with Rod Marinelli.
“I always wanted to be a head coach,” Moore said. “I was a head coach in the Army. I never pushed myself. When you were in Pittsburgh, they didn’t want any media darlings. I never promoted myself. I never got a new agent. Sometimes I may have lacked tact and diplomacy. I’m not real good at the political game.
“I’m 84 and I’m still doing exactly what I want to do. And I see some guys who get in a hurry, they do this and all of a sudden at 47 they’re selling Mutual of Omaha (insurance). Coaches have been so instrumental in my life that I thought it was such an honorable profession so maybe I could be that to some other people. Without this, I don’t know what my life would’ve been.”
After leaving the Colts following the 2010 season, Manning gathered coaches and teammates in Indianapolis for what he believed would be a grand retirement party.
“I think it was 2011, it seemed like he was kind of retired,’' Manning said. “I got with his wife. She gave me all these pictures when he was at Pittsburgh and different places and we really made a cool collage. We got great video with all the pictures and nice moments. Anyway, we had a nice retirement party downtown at a place called Harry & Izzy’s. It was a good turnout. Anyway, so damned if not the next year he’s back coaching again. He went to the Jets. So I call and I said, ‘You know, Tom, it doesn’t seem fair. You got to kind of witness your own eulogy.’ I said, ‘I really feel like you ought to give me the video back.’ He said, ‘No, no. I’m going to keep it. I watch it all the time.’'’
Manning called Moore the best coach in football. This week, he’ll be memorialized with the best of all time.
• • •
Sign up for the Sports Today newsletter to get daily updates on the Bucs, Rays, Lightning and college football across Florida.
Never miss out on the latest with your favorite Tampa Bay sports teams. Follow our coverage on Twitter and Facebook.
