It was an interesting rookie year for Kellen Moore as the Cowboys offensive coordinator. It’s hard to find any metrics or statistics that would suggest Moore didn’t have a really solid year calling plays for an offense that ended up first in total yards, sixth in points scored, and fourth in offensive scoring percentage.
ESPN’s Mike Clay decided to take a deeper dive into offensive play-callers tendencies over the last 13-years, to see who likes to do what. Now there’s a bit of a fantasy football spin to this article, but it is still extremely interesting nonetheless.
Here’s what he had to say before we get started:
I collaborated with our team of 32 NFL Nation reporters to create a weekly rundown of each team’s offensive playcaller tracing all the way back to 2007. I then applied that data to our database of statistics and put that data to work, to help determine which players should be upgraded and downgraded in fantasy.
Looking at a few of the different categories he used, Kellen Moore (in only one year as a play-caller) ended up landing in a few different “tendency” lists:
- Most offensive snaps per game: Doug Pederson (PHI), Kellen Moore (DAL), Josh McDaniels (NE)
- Most fantasy points per game: Kellen Moore (DAL), Sean Payton (NO), Josh McDaniels (NE)
This is pretty impressive company for Moore to find himself in after his rookie season as a play-caller. Clay had this to say about Moore:
Moore called a balanced offense in his first and only season as a playcaller in Dallas last season. We can’t learn much from the small sample (especially with the head-coaching change to extremely-pass-heavy Mike McCarthy), but volume was enormous in Moore’s first go-around. Dallas finished ninth in pass attempts, third in aDOT, eighth in RB carries, 23rd in RB targets (but seventh in routes), eighth in WR targets and ninth in TE targets.
As Clay mentioned, it’s a very small sample size to base any strong opinions off of just yet, but the future is bright for what Moore can bring to the table with Mike McCarthy’s offensive expertise helping him out along the way.