Brandon Staley got this feeling coming off the field, after watching the Chargers’ offense, Tuesday, and it was back again Wednesday. And even if, a few days later, he still couldn’t quite gather the words to fully explain that feeling in his gut, it was unmistakable.
It was about where his offense was and, maybe more so, about where it was going.
“I left the practice field of the last practice of minicamp saying that was the best throwing session that we’ve ever had since we’ve been here,” Staley said, over the phone from Chicago, on his second day of vacation. “It was the highest level, it was the highest quality of play, both sides of the ball, since I’ve been here. And there were a lot of reasons for it. We’ve got really good players. We’ve got guys that really believe in our culture and they’re going on Year 3 and all that. But it’s just, the level of play …
“The play-calling on both sides of the ball, the quality of the players, the belief system and how we’re doing everything, I left the field saying, This is exactly why we hired Kellen.”
There was energy. There was tempo. There was aggressiveness.
There was everything Staley envisioned when a burgeoning relationship with, and a healthy respect for, Kellen Moore led to a conversation in January, and then the Chargers swooping in to pluck the offensive coordinator off the market days after he and the Cowboys parted ways.
There was plenty of good fortune involved in it, too. It’s not often that an offensive play-caller with the skins on the wall Moore has is suddenly available, much less after such a coordinator makes it to the divisional round of the playoffs. It also wasn’t automatic that the Chargers, as rich in talent and at quarterback as they are, would be Moore’s best offer—he was in the running for the top job in Carolina right up until the end of the Panthers’ process.
But as luck would have it, there Moore was at the end of January for Staley to hire. And there he was last week, fulfilling the vision he laid out for the Chargers five months ago.
The story of how this one came together is pretty spectacular.
The Chargers’ offense, as a result, very well could be, too.
Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports (Staley); Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports (Moore)
We’re headed into my final week before the break, and we’ve got a bunch to get to on the site. On this mid-June Monday, you’ll find …
• Another look at the running back market, and how we got to this place with it.
• The Chiefs’ next big contract, and how it could help K.C. take one more big swing.
• A rookie quarterback who’s turned heads and built momentum toward training camp.
• How the supplemental draft has been shaken by college football’s changing landscape.
That’s all in the Takeaways. But we’re starting with the fascinating story of how the Chargers roped in one of the NFL’s most respected young play-callers.
Staley’s first game as a defensive coordinator—a 20–17 Rams win over the Cowboys in September 2020—was called against Moore’s Dallas offense. In his second game as a head coach, a 20–17 Chargers loss to the Cowboys, he was again tasked with slowing Moore’s scheme. And through those experiences, a healthy admiration was born.
The Chargers coach, a former quarterback himself, loved how Moore’s system forced the defense to cover so much ground, and account for all five skill players on just about every play. “It’s not like you could go in and just say, Hey, we’re going to take care of Zeke [Elliott] and [Amari] Cooper and we’re going to be O.K.,” Staley says. “It was like, No, he’s going to be able to find a weakness in your defense at some point in the game and exploit it.”
Through that lens, he also could see the agility in Moore’s mind, and how the son of a high school coach, the pupil of former Boise State coach Chris Petersen, and a guy who called plays under two head coaches (Jason Garrett and Mike McCarthy) with vastly different backgrounds, wasn’t married to a single scheme, which allowed him to better organize and tailor his offense to the talent on hand.
But Staley didn’t really know what he was looking at until last August, when the Cowboys came to Costa Mesa, Calif., for a pair of joint practices ahead of the teams’ preseason game. And for his part, while Moore had the same respect for Staley, there was a lot he’d learn over that summer week, too, starting when the Chargers coach brought the leaders from the two teams together before the work started to set the rules of engagement.
“I just thought the whole operation was so smooth, you could tell they ran a really good program, and I loved the way he brought the leaders with him,” Moore said late Friday night, from L.A. “I remember him grabbing the leaders of our group at Dallas, and the leaders for the Chargers, and getting them together just so everything ran smoothly, because usually if those guys spearhead it, things go well. So I just remember that moment thinking, This guy’s got real presence and organization going.”
“You get a feel for someone when you’re in that type of environment because it’s really competitive,” Staley adds. “And the fact that we were on the same field, we weren’t on opposite fields, we’re going against each other for two straight days, just gave me a really strong feeling of who he is. … You just got that feel for who he is as a person and just how he’s wired as a coach. It really reminded me of the significant relationships I have, whether it’s with Kevin [O’Connell], Sean [McVay], obviously Jonathan [Gannon] is my best friend.”
By the end of it, Staley wanted to add Moore to the network of coaches he communicates with regularly during the season, Moore wanted to do the same, and the two resolved to stay in touch.
Sure enough, after Khalil Mack notched three sacks in a tight-knit Chargers win over the Raiders in Week 1, Moore texted Staley to say, Hey, man, I really loved that plan. A month later, blown away by what Moore had done to get Cooper Rush (playing in place of an injured Dak Prescott) rolling, Staley was even more to the point with his message—what a plan.
But at that point, the conversation and information sharing was just that, more to foster a strong new relationship and for professional development than anything, which left the two wishing each other luck before the playoffs, with little clue what might lay ahead, even if Staley had heard some murmurs out of Dallas that a Cowboys split with Moore could happen.
Robert Deutsch/USA TODAY Sports
Moore called his last game for Dallas on Jan. 22, in a divisional round loss to the 49ers. In the days to follow, he interviewed with the Panthers and did well enough to get Carolina owner David Tepper to reconsider, at least for a few days, his decision to focus on candidates with previous head coaching experience, all while having tough conversations about his own future in Dallas and whether his arranged marriage with McCarthy had run its course.
Moore had spent the last eight years with the Cowboys, three as a player and five as a coach. The Joneses fought fiercely to keep him after firing Garrett, believing in his future, and also wanting him aboard in the event they were able to poach a big-name defensive coach like then Vikings coach Mike Zimmer to take Garrett’s spot. They stayed the course even after going the other way and hiring McCarthy, and for three years, Moore did his best to make that work.
Meanwhile, coming out of the Chargers’ wild-card round collapse, Staley was making a difficult call to move on from coordinator Joe Lombardi (who’d coached Staley in college) after his injury-ravaged offense finished in the bottom half of the league in rushing, yards per carry, touchdown rate and goal-to-go percentage, and was outplayed in a string of second halves (not the least of which was that playoff game, when the team blew a 27–0 lead).
Quickly, the tone of the running conversation Staley and Moore maintained through the season changed, and a formal interview was arranged.
“It happened fast,” Moore says. “Once the Dallas thing got sorted out, and it all felt like going down different path would be good for everyone, I was able to connect with Brandon. We touched base, and shoot, it was, I don’t know, 24 hours and we were pretty much good to go. That’s the value of staying in contact with someone, having a relationship where we’d gotten to know each other prior to that, playing against each other.
“There was such a strong foundation with each other that we were able to skip a few of those steps that traditionally you’d go through in the interview process.”
Without much time to really dive into the Chargers tape, Moore wrote down a list of his own beliefs, and then a list of things he wanted to check on with Staley, to see where Staley’s values were. The day after the interview, Moore looked back at the list and laughed, and called Staley to say, Hey, I don’t know what happened in there, like if you had a copy of the piece of paper I was working off of or something.
Conversely, where Staley already knew how good Moore was with the X’s and O’s, the interview gave him the chance to complete the picture and confirm what he’d figured.
“He’s wired the right way from a culture standpoint, a teaching standpoint,” Staley says. “You can tell that he’s about the team in every way. And that was very important to me, that we weren’t just joining up with some mercenary coach, that we were going to align ourselves with a guy that really believed in how we do things here. And that could help make us better. And it just became clear from the beginning that teaching and leading and being a part of the team was really important to him.”
In short, he saw in Moore “a complete coach,” in the same way that he’d look at McVay or Kyle Shanahan as far more than just offensive gurus. Moore understood defense like he did offense, and team-building the way he did the stuff that’d go up on a whiteboard, and could pick up what other teams do, on both sides of the ball, and apply it to what he was doing.
Within a week of the Cowboys ouster, Staley and his wife, Amy, jumped on a FaceTime with Moore and his wife, Julie, a call on which the deal to bring Moore to L.A. would be pushed over the goal line. The fit, as the two saw it, couldn’t have been much better, right down to the couples on that call having kids who happened to be the same age.
As luck would have it (and maybe as another sign that this alliance was written in the stars), Moore actually got some time with Justin Herbert last summer, as those two and Cowboys linebacker Leighton Vander Esch—all of them Pacific Northwest college football legends—shot a commercial for a car dealership together. Moore and his future triggerman hit it off, figuring out within minutes how many connections they shared from coming up as quarterbacks in that part of the country.
Moore’s first impression? “What a remarkable guy.”
So while they didn’t stay in touch as Staley and Moore did, they did have more than a passing conversation, which made it easy for Moore to pick up the phone and make Herbert his first call after taking the Charger job in January.
What Herbert would learn is what Staley loved about Moore’s philosophy—the offense would be the quarterback’s. Because Moore played for Lombardi in Detroit in 2014, the terminology the Chargers used the previous two years wasn’t foreign to him. And with his diverse experience, Moore would have plenty in his bag to apply what the Chargers had done well to what he planned to bring with him from the Cowboys.
“Studying Peyton Manning and [Tom] Brady, certainly those two guys really stand out, even Philip Rivers to an extent … these guys, that’ve been titans, played 15-plus years, Drew [Brees is] a good example; it’s like they become the offense,” Staley says. “It’s like, you know, wherever those guys went, Yeah, Tom played for four different coaches in New England, but it was the same system that was building over time. Same thing with Peyton Manning. Yeah, he may have had Tom Moore and Clyde Christensen, but when he went to Denver with [Adam] Gase and that group of guys, Hey man, they just kept that thing moving.
“Understanding that, understanding the evolution of football at that position and how important it is, it was important that you hire the right person that can keep a lot of the things that Justin’s learned.”
And more than just that, there was plenty Moore saw on the Chargers’ tape that he liked, and wanted to keep from what Lombardi had built, some of which was carried over from the offense that Shane Steichen ran when Herbert was a rookie.
“Some of the routes that Justin and Keenan [Allen] and those guys have, that they’ve spent and invested so much time on, making sure that all these choice routes that Justin and Keenan have spent three years working on, let’s make sure we keep that going,” Moore says. “What Mike [Williams] does out on the edges one-on-one, some of the routes he runs, let’s make sure we’re not losing those. That was one of the big things.
“And I thought Justin is a tremendous progression passer. That’s one of the things that stuck out on film, was they’d done such a good job, from Shane to Joe over the course of the last three years.”
With that established, where Moore wanted to grow the offense was with an aggressive approach that would make the defense respect both the deeper parts of the field, while having a run game that won’t allow for the field to be flooded with defensive backs.
And as part of that, Staley really wanted to tap into what he saw Moore do with Prescott and Rush the same, in getting the quarterback to play fast, by any means necessary. That, the thinking went, would result in an offense that can play fast as a whole, which allows for a unit to control the tempo and terms that games are played on.
The good news for everyone, from there, is what Moore was struck with immediately with Herbert—his aptitude was obvious, and allowed the coaches to keep building on the offense without concern that it’d slow the quarterback much.
“I gotta tell you, I’ve been around a handful of QBs; we’ve all been around a lot of them,” Moore says. “His ability to call a play in the huddle is, for a new system to some degree, some of it he’s gonna remember from Joe’s system, some of it’s gonna be new, his ability to roll off play calls in the huddle, there’s even some language I’m looking at the piece of paper like, Hey, am I calling this right? He’ll just roll these things off, and it’s incredible. …
“I’m used to calling every play two times. And there’s already been a couple times where I call it once, and I start calling it a second time, and he’s already into the huddle, he’s like, I got it. Like, I’m rolling. I’m sitting there trying to talk to him, and he’s ignoring me already because he’s got it memorized. It’s tremendous. It’s been really, really impressive.”
The challenge from there, Moore says, is leveraging that ability while making sure it’s all consistently digestible for the other 10 guys in the huddle, and that’s a challenge the Chargers have spent the last nine weeks trying to conquer.
Corey Perrine/Florida Times-Union/USA Today Network
Moore has structured OTAs to have three phases for installing his offense.
The first is building the system, from generating the big-picture philosophy, to deciding how plays are going to be called, to sorting those calls and concepts into families of plays, which allows for the players to more easily learn and apply them at a high speed. Once that foundation is set, the second phase is melding an offensive staff that’s largely incumbent, outside of Moore and QBs coach Doug Nussmeier (who came from Dallas), together with the players. The third is using OTAs and minicamp to build the passing game.
“The way the structure of OTAs are, it’s nice to get a little bit of a head start on that,” Moore says. “The part you miss, which you really don’t get until training camp, which all of us deal with, is the run game and the play-action game, and all the stuff that ultimately you have to wait until you get in pads to get real good looks at. That’s the part we’re really excited about. Guys are ready to have this little break, but then get into the pads phase so we can really get this run game rolling, and get our identity there.”
The assessment is, of course, a reminder of where the Chargers are, like everyone else, in the calendar. It’s still June, and this is a time for optimism. If you’re not feeling the way these guys are, chances are, you’re in trouble.
That said, Staley says there are things he thought to be true about his new hire, as they built their relationship in the fall, that he’s been able to confirm through the spring. And while he loves the overarching, program-type stuff he learned in interviewing him, and now employing him, he’s also even more drawn now to what he saw in Week 1 in 2020, Week 2 in ’21 and what, based on the last few weeks on the practice field, it can bring to his team.
“There are some guys that are just really good at the game,” Staley says. “Sean, Kyle, those guys that are really high-level play-callers. McDaniels—Josh is a really special play-caller on game day. And I think Kellen has that. Me having to defend him and observe him from afar, I think he’s a really good play-caller on game day.”
That much was apparent at the minicamp.
Whether it carries over to September or, ultimately, January remains to be seen. But it wasn’t very hard for Staley to ferret out good signs that it could last week.
“I just really felt like we could see our guys playing with the type of energy and the type of execution that you need in order to be a world champion,” the coach says. “I saw our guys having fun out there. I saw Keenan Allen tearing it up, and he’s 31, but he’s playing like a young man. I saw Mike Williams playing as well as he’s ever played. I saw Justin just on the attack. He was aggressive and he was playing fast. That competitor in him, you could see it.
“And you didn’t ever see him stuck. Sometimes when you have transition you’re worried like, Hey, is there going to be a point where he’s not playing fast? There was none of that. I saw a lot of confidence out there on the field.”
Among the others who saw it, per Staley—Derwin James, Joey Bosa, Khalil Mack and Sebastian Joseph-Day, four returning members of the defense. “They see it,” he says. “And they’re really smart. They know.”
And if things come together for the Chargers over the next eight months as they did between Staley and Moore over the last eight months, everyone else will, too.
