Tom Moore philosophy: ‘You do what your players can do’

Tom Moore has a wealth of experience as an NFL coach.

Hired by the Arizona Cardinals as assistant head coach/offense, Moore has been helping professional offenses since 1977, including stints with seven different teams.

So what kind of system will the coaching veteran bring to his eighth organization?

A non-system, system.

“Football is a game of people,” Moore said at his introductory press conference Friday. “There’s lots of systems, and one of the things that you want to make sure that you do and that’s what we’re doing right now, you don’t come in with preconceived ideas and say ‘I’m Tom Moore and this is what we’re going to do.'”

Moore said that type of mentality won’t work.

“You’ve got to do what your players can do,” he said. “Find out what they can do, find out what they’re the best at, find out what their strengths are and then make sure that you take advantage of their strengths and maximize them.”

Adding that a coach’s job is to “make sure that you give your players a chance to be the very best they can be,” Moore’s perspective appears to be different from that of the previous coaching regime.

Gone is talk about how “the system works” or “the system is proven”, and in its place is the idea that it would be best to plan around the talent on the roster.

“You do what your players can do,” Moore said.

That means learning a roster full of players who struggled last season, so finding strengths, at least from a fan’s perspective, may be a difficult task. But rest assured, Moore says, every player has strengths.

“You’ve got to play to your players’ strengths,” he said. “What can they do?”

Moore said at this point the coaching staff doesn’t know what the players can do, so it would be “premature” to say what exactly the offensive game plan will be.

Whether this mentality and style will be enough to transform an offense that was dead last in the NFL remains to be seen, but at the very least, any change Moore and head coach Bruce Arians make probably can’t hurt.

And given that Arians was hired in large part because of his track record on the offensive side of the ball, both he and Moore are expected to turn things around.

“At Indianapolis we had certain things that we felt we could do that we could take advantage of and Bruce was a very big part of that,” Moore said. “We worked together for three years; he was with Peyton Manning…it wasn’t a Tom Moore system, it was an Indianapolis Colts system and Bruce was very integral in that.”

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