Kellen Moore and Jalen Hurts: Heisman finalists, coaches’ sons, hope for the Eagles

Hiring a coordinator under duress is generally the first sign that you are already dead. Sometimes it is more obvious than others. One of the more famous deleted scenes from The Sixth Sense was when Bruce Willis hired Ben McAdoo to run his offense. Didn’t make the final cut because it would have given away the ending.

Sometimes the boring hire is the safe hire. Kellen Moore is both of those things. I don’t mean boring in a pejorative sense. Where the Eagles are at this point, you kind of have to evaluate things on a scale of impending doom. One thing we can say for sure: It is better than hiring Jason Garrett.

Will it work? That’s a more complicated question. It’s also out of his control. The onus is still on Jalen Hurts and Nick Sirianni. They are the two most important legs of the Eagles’ new offensive triumvirate. They are the ignition switch. The red wire and the blue wire. They are what matters.

Moore? He’s fine. More than fine, really. The Eagles could not have asked for a more suitable candidate to become available on this year’s coaching market. That’s true at both a high level and at a more granular one. The top line of his resumé speaks for itself: five years of NFL play-calling experience for three head coaches with two franchise quarterbacks, one of whom took a big developmental leap forward under his guidance. Moore’s offenses have ranked top six in points scored in three of his five seasons. Twice, they’ve led the NFL in total yardage.

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But forget about the on-field stuff for a second. Just as important — maybe more so — is Moore’s track record in navigating situations similar to the one that awaits him with the Eagles. He knows what it is like to call plays for a coach who is on the hot seat, having done so for Garrett in 2019 and Brandon Staley in 2023. He knows how it feels to work for an activist owner in a high-profile, high-pressure environment. Moore is still five months shy of his 35th birthday. But in Jerry Jones years, he’s early-stage Benjamin Button.

For all of those reasons, Moore is an encouraging choice. There aren’t many young, accomplished, ambitious assistant coaches the Eagles could have hired without undermining Sirianni’s authority. Take Kliff Kingsbury, for example. He has spent 10 of the last 11 seasons as a head coach, first at Texas Tech, then with the Arizona Cardinals. For most of that time, he has been regarded as the Next Big Thing in coaching. He has the looks and charisma of an Instagram influencer and the verified blue check to go with it. The worst thing you could do to a head coach is make him hire someone more famous than he is.

Really, the worst thing you can do is make him hire anybody. Or, at least, give that appearance. The Eagles are trying to thread a needle here. Most organizations that attempt to do so end up with puncture wounds all over their bodies. The moment an organization loses confidence in a head coach is the moment a head coach loses the thing he needs to succeed. Moore saw it in Dallas with Garrett and in San Diego with Staley. We’ve seen it in Carolina with Matt Rhule and in Washington with Ron Rivera. Asking a coordinator to save your head coach’s job is usually a self-fulfilling prophecy, given the pressure and power dynamics within an NFL organization. If you don’t trust your coach to hire his right-hand men, why is he your coach?

The Eagles did themselves no favors by waiting a week to officially confirm that Sirianni would be returning as head coach. They were in a tough spot, no doubt, totally unprepared for the speed at which the narrative winds shifted down the stretch. They certainly owed it to their fans, their players and themselves to take a hard look at everything that happened. But the way they did it gave the impression that Sirianni was re-interviewing for his job. The search for a new offensive coordinator became a search for a guy to assume the duties they stripped from Sirianni.

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I’m not sure that impression is entirely fair. When the Eagles finally held their annual year-end news conference, there was an Office Space moment when somebody essentially asked Sirianni what, exactly, it was that he’d be doing.

“The head coach of the football team,” Sirianni said rather coldly.

There was a flicker of ego and indignation there, and it was entirely justified. The power structure that Sirianni and general manager Howie Roseman outlined was hardly one of a figurehead. As long as Moore is reporting to Sirianni and not Roseman, there is nothing out of the ordinary. It’s silly to think that Sirianni will spend all week sitting by himself in an office labeled head coach and then emerge to give a pregame speech and play some rock, paper, scissors. In all likelihood, things will work the same way they always have, the same way they do in virtually every NFL building. Sirianni will set the agenda and have final say over everything that occurs on the field.

“We’re bringing in a guy to bring in new ideas, to do the things that he’s done in the past,” Sirianni said. “But it would be crazy not to add some of the things that we’ve done in the past here as well. I don’t know if it’s going to be 95% this, 95% that — we’re not there yet. We’re working on getting the best guy in here for the job and a guy who has a vision, a guy who’s going to call the plays, a guy who’s going to be able to coach the quarterback in the same sense there. It’s just about getting the right guy, and then we’ll decide where that goes, but I’m hiring him to do a job and to be in charge of the offense.”

If that sounds convoluted, it’s probably because intuitive concepts sound that way when someone tries to put them into words. Moore will bring his own scheme and experience and strategic beliefs, sure. But no scheme is the same in any given year. And, besides, football is football. Every play on every play sheet is the result of the contributions of an entire staff and the final say of the head coach. Because he is, you know, the head coach.

We’ll reevaluate things if Sirianni arrives for minicamp and realizes that the Eagles have reassigned him to the office that Roseman used under Chip Kelly.

Right now, Sirianni’s biggest task is winning back the faith of his quarterback. Nobody really knows what Hurts thinks about everything that has happened since the end of the season. Sirianni was curiously circumspect, borderline avoidant whenever the topic of Hurts came up. There are all kinds of possible explanations for that, so I’ll try not to read too much into it. Hurts had a long-standing friendship with Brian Johnson. The Eagles fired him. That’s a tricky situation, whether or not Hurts felt it was for the better.

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“Obviously they have a relationship,” said Sirianni, who said he’d “communicated” with Hurts about the move but declined to discuss specifics of their conversations. “You’ll have to ask Jalen when you get an opportunity to talk to him. But anytime you have to let people go, we all hurt when we let people go. Every one of us. This is the worst part of the job, having to let people go.”

Whoever the Eagles hired to replace Johnson, his most important task was going to be winning Hurts’ trust and coaching him back to being an MVP-caliber quarterback. For all the talk of the Moore-Sirianni dynamic in scheme/play-calling, what matters more than anything will be his relationship with Hurts.

Here, too, Moore has some encouraging background. Like Hurts, he is the son of a longtime high school football coach. Like Hurts, he was an undersized and overlooked college quarterback who rose to great heights. Nine years before Hurts was on the Heisman Trophy stage at the Downtown Athletic Club, Moore was there as the fourth-place finisher in 2010.

Moore seemed to have a good working relationship with both Dak Prescott and Justin Herbert. His first year calling plays in Dallas, Prescott threw for 4,902 yards, eclipsing his previous career high of 3,885. As for Herbert, his experience was limited to 12½ games before a season-ending injury. For what it’s worth, the Chargers ranked eighth in the NFL in scoring offense through their first 11 games.

The quarterback is the key. Always is. It will be as true for Moore as it was for Johnson, and as it is for Sirianni.

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