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‘Players, not plays.’
Moore was a young wide receivers coach in Pittsburgh when Swann walked into his office one morning and shut the door.
“John and I are good receivers,” Swann said of him and Stallworth. “We know how to catch, we’re gonna play a long time and make a lot of money. We need you to teach us what we don’t know.”
“Well, what don’t you know?” Moore asked.
“How to recognize and beat coverages.”
Moore drilled the pair on different defensive schemes, then showed them the routes that would beat each. The secrets came in the subtleties, Moore stressed, like how a cornerback’s feet were lined up before the snap. For the two receivers, the best years of their Hall of Fame careers would follow. So would two more Super Bowl wins.
As offensive coordinator in Detroit in the mid-90s, Moore designed his scheme around Sanders’ inimitable talents. “He wouldn’t say anything to anybody,” the coach says of the Hall of Famer. But man, he worked. Moore used to marvel at how every day after practice, Sanders would stay on the field to run gassers alone.
“Coach, I watch a lot of film, but what I see on that screen and what I see on the field aren’t the same thing,” Sanders once told him. “Every game starts out really fast, but the more carries I get, the more it all slows down.”
Sanders wanted 25, 30 touches a game. Moore obliged. “There was no running back by committee with Barry Sanders,” he says. “He’d have 12 carries for 38 yards. Then he’d have 18 for 185.”
In Indianapolis, he and Manning shared a maniacal drive — Moore arrived before the crack of dawn to sketch out new plays, while the QB stayed late to pore through film, sometimes falling asleep with the remote in hand.
“Thirteen years with the Colts and I can’t think of one meeting Tom wasn’t in there with me,” Manning says.
Moore skipped his own brother’s funeral so he wouldn’t miss a practice. Until his neck injury in 2011, Manning didn’t miss many, either. Once, while ESPN’s Jon Gruden and Ron Jaworski were watching practice before a “Monday Night Football” game, Gruden asked Moore why Manning’s backups never got a single rep.
“Fellas, if 18 goes down, we’re f—ed,” Moore told them. “And we don’t practice f—ed.”
Gruden told Manning about the comment later.
“You can probably debate it in different ways,” Manning says now. “When I got injured in 2011, it sort of showed itself (the Colts went 2-14), but that’s just how we practiced in Indy. We had guys who just didn’t come out — ever. That was how Marvin practiced. I remember when Reggie (Wayne) got there, he was like, ‘Oh, this is how it is?’ So he never came out, either. And if they were in there, I was gonna be in there.”
‘It’s 1-2-3, throw the m—–f—er away. If you don’t, they’re gonna be carrying you out of the stadium boots first.’
As a coach, Moore was rigid and unrelenting, especially with young quarterbacks. This is the line they’d hear if they held onto the ball too long.
“Jim Sorgi probably still hears that in his sleep,” longtime Colts tight end Dallas Clark says. “And then wakes up in a cold sweat.”
For the rookie offensive lineman who jumped too soon: “Son, I hope you come from a rich family, because it’d be a shame you don’t make this team because you can’t stay onside.”
Before the team would break for summer: “Don’t go showing your high school or college coaches our playbook. This is our playbook. These are my plays. Tell your coaches to wake up a little earlier in the morning and come up with their own goddamn plays.”
Eventually, Manning and a few teammates printed off T-shirts with all of Moore’s one-liners.
“He handed those T-shirts out like they were his business cards,” Manning says.
‘We don’t got any Northwesterns on this schedule.’
This was a nod to Moore’s days as Iowa’s starting quarterback, when the Wildcats were a Big Ten bottom-feeder. After the Army, the WFL and five stops in college football, Moore landed a job at the University of Minnesota. That’s where, in the early 1970s, he recruited a talented but temperamental quarterback out of Jackson, Mich.
“Believe it or not, I had a temper back then,” Tony Dungy admits. “I was a yeller and a screamer and a terrible loser, a total hothead.”
Initially, Dungy didn’t even want to visit the campus; he’d never even been on a plane before. It was Moore who finally convinced him. And after Dungy won the starting job, it was Moore who taught him how to keep his emotions in check.
“If you’re gonna be the quarterback for this team, then you’ve gotta be under control,” Moore scolded.
Dungy was the team’s MVP his last two seasons but went undrafted in 1977. He then signed with the Steelers as a defensive back after the team’s new wide receivers coach convinced Noll to give him a shot.
“Without Tom in my life, who knows what would have happened?” Dungy says now.
Twenty-five years later, Dungy landed in Indianapolis as the Colts’ new head coach. Moore was already in place, and Dungy never once considered making a change.
“Now, instead of him telling me what to do, I was his boss,” Dungy says. “It didn’t even seem right.”
‘Pressure is what you feel when you don’t know what you’re doing.’
It was Week 14 of the 2000 season. The Colts were in an early 14-0 hole to the Jets, and Moore was incensed. “Peyton,” he barked at Manning on the sideline, “we’re going no-huddle the rest of the game.” The QB nodded, and while their second-half rally came up short, a thought lingered in Moore’s mind during the flight home.
“Why are we waiting to get down 14?” he asked Manning.
Manning wanted to start in the no-huddle and wanted total control at the line of scrimmage. He felt he’d earned it. So that evening, Moore decided the Colts were going to speed up — a decision that would reshape NFL offenses for years to come. They’d start every game in the no-huddle, called Lightning. Manning would have complete command, perhaps more than any other quarterback in league history.
“Defenses want to substitute every three plays, but they ain’t doing that against us,” Moore says. “Their ass is gonna stay on the field.”
It was an audacious gamble, handing over that level of responsibility to a third-year QB who’d thrown a league-record 28 picks as a rookie. Previously, Moore would dial up three plays — a run to the right, a run to the left and a pass — and Manning would decide on one, depending on the defensive front he saw. In Lightning, it was one play with options Manning could check into. Or, he could scrap it altogether and call a new one. The QB would run the show.
“Tom basically said, ‘We’ve got this really smart quarterback, and we’re going to let him use his brain as a weapon,'” says Christensen, then the Colts’ wide receivers coach. “Honestly, not a lot of coaches back then were secure enough to do something like that, just turn their system over to one player.
“But it gave Peyton so much confidence. It’s not like Tom was giving the keys to Jim Sorgi or Curtis Painter.”
Most of the time, when Moore would begin rattling off the call, Manning would pound his chest, their signal that he knew the rest. Moore would wave back from the sideline. You got it, kid.
“Not every QB wants that type of responsibility,” Dungy says. “But we had one who did.”
The Colts finished in the top three in scoring five straight seasons. Manning started piling up MVP awards. Before every game during that stretch, Moore would leave his QB with a few words before he jogged onto the field: Play smart, not scared.
That’s how Moore coached and how he called plays: without fear. The success that followed? That was the players, Moore insisted. Any failures were on him.
“I always used to tell Peyton this: You throw the touchdowns, I call the interceptions,” Moore says. “If you think you should do something, do it, and if they don’t like it, they can come see me. You can do no wrong. Don’t call plays and checks at the line of scrimmage wondering if it’s the right play. That’ll drive you crazy.
“You know what you’re doing. Do your thing and don’t ever, ever look back. If you make the wrong decision, you didn’t — I didn’t do a good enough job coaching you. I’ll take the hit.”
Manning remembers that speech, almost verbatim, two decades later. “I never took that for granted,” he says.
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