What will the Kellen Moore offense look like?
We got a fairly comprehensive glimpse behind the curtain from backup quarterback Kenny Pickett after practice Tuesday.
We’ve all been wondering about Moore’s scheme since the Eagles hired the former Cowboys offensive coordinator in January to replace Brian Johnson, fired a week after last season ended.
All we know is that the Eagles’ offense grew unimaginative, predictable and dull as last year went on. "Stale,” in Nick Sirianni’s own word.
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And if we all knew what play was coming next, the Eagles’ opponents certainly did. And it showed.
That was last year.
Through OTAs and the first couple weeks of training camp we’ve seen a few hallmarks of the Kellen Moore system, and it looks very different. Lots of motion, lots of movement, lots of formations, lots of surprises.
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Pickett, the Steelers’ starting quarterback the last two years, shed some light on what makes Moore’s system so successful and what it will look like this fall when it’s operating at peak efficiency.
“I think a balance and attack in all areas of the field, whether it's in the pass game, the run game,” Pickett said. “We're distributing the ball to a lot of different guys in a lot of different spots.
"We have versatile players that can do a lot of different things. The motion and shifts to get defenses off balance before the snap has been great. He's got a lot of different wrinkles in his offense, but it's simple for us running it, I think that's important.
“It's not incredibly hard for us to pick up the offense. We just do a lot of things in different ways, but it's the same for us from a play standpoint.”
Through Week 12 last year, the Eagles ranked third in the NFL with 28 points per game, and their 10-1 record was best in the NFL. Nobody else even had nine wins.
The rest of the year? They averaged 18.9 points per game – a 33 percent decline – and went 1-6, including the playoff loss in Tampa.
It was a historic collapse and Moore – as well as Vic Fangio on the other side of the ball – is here to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
With Moore, everything is predicated on the offense being impossible to decipher. That means having a keen understanding of your own tendencies and being ready to break them at exactly the right time.
“Once you get to game plan football and you get into the regular season, you have to be really conscious of who is on the field and what those tendencies dictate,” Moore said Tuesday. “Sometimes you want to create tendencies for your own ability to trump them at later points.
“We'll continue to evolve and utilize all those different points, whether it be who is on the field from tight ends, running backs, it’s every single unit. We have to really be conscious of that to protect our tendencies.
"Sometimes you want to have tendencies to break them in critical moments.”
If that sounds next level to you, it’s because it is.
Johnson wasn’t a bad coach. You don’t have the 3rd-highest-scoring offense in the entire league early December if you are. He was just a rookie offensive coordinator who found himself a bit over his head as the season went on and didn’t have any answers when teams began figuring him out.
One way to become unpredictable is to distribute the ball to a bunch of different receivers, which Moore’s offenses have always done. And that works nicely with the number of capable receivers the Eagles have. That includes wideouts, running backs and tight ends.
It's why you see everyone from A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, Saquon Barkley and Dallas Goedert to Britain Covey, Grant Calcaterra, Johnny Wilson and Kenny Gainwell catching the ball at practice.
“That’s what you want,” Pickett said. “Offensively, it's really what you want. It's kind of like a pick-your-poison. If you try to take one away, somewhere there's going to be a 1-on-1 or there's going to be a light box to run the football. It's just kind of how the system's built, the kind of players that we have.
“As long as we continue to progress the way we are, it's going to be tough to stop.”
