One Man’s Opinion: Kellen Moore, still a good fit as Vikings Head Coach…
There’s a popular narrative circling the Internet right now that Dallas Cowboys offensive coordinator Kellen Moore may have just coached himself out of candidacy for vacant head coaching jobs after the Cowboys Wild Card loss to the San Francisco 49ers. Well, it might just be one man’s opinion but the way that game ended Sunday afternoon shouldn’t be the determining factor on Moore’s future and the Vikings are right to still have interest in him as a potential head coach.
We have to take a deep breath here. Take a step back and look at the bigger picture, if only for a moment putting the recency bias off to the side.
Much the same way that general managers tell us that they’re not judging a player off of their bowl game (good or bad) or one bad game mixed in, they’ll tell you that they’re judging them by, say it with me, “the entirety of their body of work” in college. We should all be doing that with Kellen Moore as well. That’s not to say that we’ll ignore it, it’s a factor to be considered, from all angles.
So let’s take a look at the full picture and really explore the candidacy of Kellen Moore as an option for Minnesota Vikings head coach.
According to Adam Schefter and other sources the Vikings have officially put in a request to interview Moore at some point this week.
While the public’s view of Moore has his stock dropping pretty rapidly, the Vikings might have other ideas, and they’re opinions are probably warranted.
Moore, 32 years old, is a fast rising, offensive-minded coaching candidate. In Dallas over the last three seasons, Moore led the Cowboys to becoming the league’s top ranked total offense and top ranked scoring offense for the 2021 regular season. Looking back even further, Dallas also had the highest rated total offense in 2019 as well before losing their quarterback Dak Prescott for the 2020 season.
As Dustin Baker shared on Vikings Territory earlier this week “under Moore in 2021, the Cowboys own the NFL’s sixth-best offense per DVOA and seventh-best per EPA/play.”
Despite their struggles against one of the league’s best defenses on Sunday, only mustering 17 points against the 49ers, Moore developed the Cowboys offense into one of the league’s most innovative attacks focusing on getting the ball into the hands of their playmakers. That sounds great to Vikings fans who have been begging for an offensive approach that is built around the players on roster, rather than the shoving a square peg through a round hole approach it has felt like for much of the last decade.
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So let’s talk about Sunday afternoon in Dallas.
Many Vikings fans knee-jerked and immediately crossed Moore off their list after Sunday’s game, specifically because of the play call on what ended up as the final play of the game. To be honest, it’s hard to hate the play call when you see the middle of the field open up the way that it did. It was a proper assumption that the defense would double up all receiving options on the outside and with a mobile quarterback like Prescott, it proved to be an effective play call. The execution on the other hand might have been slightly sub-par as Tony Romo highlights in this clip of the broadcast. Tough to completely fault the O.C. for this one.
All of this to say, before the Cowboys laid a stinker on Sunday afternoon (which as an organization they certainly are wont to do), Kellen Moore fits almost every single mold that Vikings fans have been clamoring for. He’s young, he’s innovative, he’s adaptable, he’s aggressive; his skill set and coaching attributes pinned with the Vikings offensive roster seems to fit like a glove and could be a welcomed breath of fresh air for a frustrated team and fan base.
Here’s to hoping the Vikings front office can put their own recency bias to the side and give Moore a fair shot when he interviews later this week. It’s fair to put his feet to the fire and ask what happened this week, but if you put too much clout into one game or one play call, you might miss out. Moore is likely to land a job this season, if not he’ll almost certainly find a head job in the next two seasons. He feels like the kind of candidate that we could regret letting slip through our fingertips.