If you want to know who was the better quarterback – Tom Brady or Peyton Manning – Tom Moore might be the best person to ask. He coached both all-time greats – won Super Bowls with both, in fact. But Moore might be a bit biased. By the time he began working with Brady, the venerable offensive coach was in his 80s and serving as a consultant with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. With the Indianapolis Colts and Manning, things were a little different.
Tom Moore, who announced his retirement from pro football on Thursday, was there at the beginning of Manning's professional career. He helped the young QB adjust to life in the NFL and called many of the plays that led to a first-ballot Hall of Fame career.
Now 87, Moore is stepping away from the game that has provided his livelihood for 62 years. He began coaching as a graduate assistant at Iowa and eventually joined the professional ranks in the late ‘70s.
Along the way, he was part of four Super Bowl-winning clubs. But he will always be best remembered as the offensive coordinator of those explosive Colts’ teams in the first decade of the 21st century.
Colts’ legend Tom Moore retiring after retiring after 62 years
Tom Moore’s first professional coaching job came with the Pittsburgh Steelers and Chuck Noll. He stepped into the middle of one of the greatest dynasties the league has ever known. Moore was coaching wide receivers, and in each of his first three seasons, he had an All-Pro – Lynn Swann in 1977 and ’78, and John Stallworth in 1979.
Pittsburgh won Super Bowls in its second and third years in the NFL.
Moore would ascend to offensive coordinator a few years later, a position he would keep until 1989. Then, after bouncing around the league for a while, he landed in Indianapolis with Jim Mora.
The first year, the Colts finished last in the league with a 3-13 record. That gave them the first pick in the draft, and they chose Manning. If you’re a Colts fan, you know what happened after that.
Working with Manning, Moore presided over the league’s best offense for the next decade. When Tony Dungy was hired to replace Mora after the 2001 season, he kept Moore on as offensive coordinator. They had served together in Pittsburgh in the ‘80s, but the relationship went back even farther. Moore recruited Dungy when he was entering college.
Tom Moore seemed to build those kinds of long-lasting relationships wherever he went. One of the most remarkable statistics about his career is this: he spent at least three years with six different NFL franchises, and more than five years with four of them.
The thirteen seasons he spent in Indianapolis constitute one of the longest and most successful stints any coordinator has ever achieved in professional football. Manning talked about it in an interview back in 2014.
“It’s pretty rare for a coordinator and a quarterback to stay that long together," Manning said. "If you call good plays and play good quarterback, they’re gonna keep you around. So I guess we’re both kind of proud of the fact that we could stay together that long because we both did our jobs and worked hard at our jobs.”
Over the past six seasons, Moore has been a special consultant in Tampa. Just like he did at the beginning of his pro coaching career, Moore helped his club to a Super Bowl championship in his second season, this time with Brady at quarterback. The offenses he has been affiliated with in Tampa have scored more than 500 points twice during his latest run.
Moore became an offensive coordinator when he was 45, but he never had the “boy genius” tag applied to him. Those Colts’ offenses were dynamic and creative, and Moore’s name was certainly known, but he was never the story. Manning and Marvin, Reggie and Edgerrin … those were the names everyone knew. Kind of the way it is meant to be.
NFL Films did a ten-minute story on Moore’s storied career a few years back. It begins with him chatting with Shane Steichen, not long after Steichen had gotten the Colts’ job. Throughout the video, Bucs’ colleagues like head coach Todd Bowles and QB Baker Mayfield sing his praises, but it is Manning who has the most to say. In a professional sense, the Colts’ QB knew him best.
“I can still hear him calling plays to me in my sleep,” Manning says with a smile.
They all talk about his sayings – “It’s 1,2,3 and throw the ball away” (it’s actually more colorful than that, but I can’t write the whole thing in a family column) and his practices – every practice route was run at full speed.
Then Manning gets to the most important thing. Moore designed his offenses around his players, and not the other way around.
That philosophy served him well over many decades in professional football. Fortunately for the Colts, his best years were spent in Indiana.