NFL

TAMPA, Fla. — Every morning starts the same: a drive through the pre-dawn darkness, a 3:15 a.m. arrival and pages of play calls he likes to sketch in pencil. That’s how Chuck Noll taught him, and that’s how Tom Moore’s done it ever since.

Sleep in? The man’s offended. “Lay there and stare at the ceiling?” he groans. “I’m 84. I’m not sure how many days I’ve got left to live, but I know one thing: I ain’t gonna waste them sleeping.”

He’s been at this almost 70 years. His stops include Korea, where in the 1960s he led a team in the U.S. Army’s 7th Infantry Division, and the long-defunct World Football League. Back then, the New York Stars played their home games at Triborough Stadium, where the lights were so shoddy they couldn’t televise the games. But, Moore points out, “if you had a choice room at Rikers Island jail across the river, you could see the field just fine.” He didn’t get paid the last six months of the season and left dead broke.

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By 1977 he’d found his way to the NFL, working under Noll in Pittsburgh. Moore spent the next five decades scripting a career as one of the greatest offensive minds in league history — and perhaps the most overlooked. “Before you had play callers getting all this attention, Tom was doing it better than anyone else,” says Clyde Christensen, who coached in the NFL for 26 years. “We’re talking about one of the best play callers of all time.”

During Moore’s 45-year NFL career, he worked with Lynn Swann and John Stallworth in Pittsburgh, Cris Carter in Minnesota, Barry Sanders in Detroit, Peyton Manning in Indianapolis, Larry Fitzgerald in Arizona and Tom Brady in Tampa Bay. And he did it by signing 45 contracts without ever hiring an agent. “If I can’t get a job myself, I don’t deserve it,” he says. “And I don’t want it.”

In June, Moore was honored with the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Award of Excellence; by July, he was back on a practice field, barking one-liners at players 60 years his junior. His current title: senior offensive consultant for the Buccaneers. More to the point: He’s a coaching lifer who can’t quit the game.

“What am I gonna do?” Moore says. “Hang out with old people?”

And ask anyone who’s ever suited up for him: this man’s words stay with you.

‘It’s a simple game. We make it hard.’

Before a road game at New England during Manning’s second season, Moore, the Colts’ offensive coordinator, was worried the Patriots would sniff out a play that burned them a year prior, a slant-and-go to Marvin Harrison that went for a touchdown. He warned Manning about using the same play call.

“Just call it and I’ll change it to a slant-go-slant,” the QB replied.

“Come up with a new name for it,” Moore urged.

Manning repped the new route with Harrison all week, and on the second drive of the game, the Colts advanced to the Patriots’ 10-yard-line. Moore wanted the slant-go-slant but realized he didn’t know the verbiage. So he improvised.

This is what Manning heard in his helmet:

All right, Peyton, let’s run dice run … scat right … ummm …

… you know what, Peyton?

… just run whatever the f— you and Marvin have been working on.

The Colts’ equipment staff — standing right next to Moore on the sideline — erupted with laughter.

“I assume a lot of people have this idea that in the NFL, we’ve got this sophisticated language and all these complex play calls,” Manning says now, trying to hold back laughter. “Well, sometimes it was as simple as Tom yelling at me to run whatever the f— Marvin and I had been working on.”

The slant-go-slant went for another touchdown.

‘Players, not plays.’

Moore was a young wide receivers coach in Pittsburgh when Swann walked into his office one morning and shut the door.

“John and I are good receivers,” Swann said of him and Stallworth. “We know how to catch, we’re gonna play a long time and make a lot of money. We need you to teach us what we don’t know.”

“Well, what don’t you know?” Moore asked.

“How to recognize and beat coverages.”

Moore drilled the pair on different defensive schemes, then showed them the routes that would beat each. The secrets came in the subtleties, Moore stressed, like how a cornerback’s feet were lined up before the snap. For the two receivers, the best years of their Hall of Fame careers would follow. So would two more Super Bowl wins.

Moore spent his first 13 NFL seasons coaching under Chuck Noll in Pittsburgh. (George Gojkovich / Getty Images)

As offensive coordinator in Detroit in the mid-90s, Moore designed his scheme around Sanders’ inimitable talents. “He wouldn’t say anything to anybody,” the coach says of the Hall of Famer. But man, he worked. Moore used to marvel at how every day after practice, Sanders would stay on the field to run gassers alone.

“Coach, I watch a lot of film, but what I see on that screen and what I see on the field aren’t the same thing,” Sanders once told him. “Every game starts out really fast, but the more carries I get, the more it all slows down.”

Sanders wanted 25, 30 touches a game. Moore obliged. “There was no running back by committee with Barry Sanders,” he says. “He’d have 12 carries for 38 yards. Then he’d have 18 for 185.”

In Indianapolis, he and Manning shared a maniacal drive — Moore arrived before the crack of dawn to sketch out new plays, while the QB stayed late to pore through film, sometimes falling asleep with the remote in hand.

“Thirteen years with the Colts and I can’t think of one meeting Tom wasn’t in there with me,” Manning says.

Moore skipped his own brother’s funeral so he wouldn’t miss a practice. Until his neck injury in 2011, Manning didn’t miss many, either. Once, while ESPN’s Jon Gruden and Ron Jaworski were watching practice before a “Monday Night Football” game, Gruden asked Moore why Manning’s backups never got a single rep.

“Fellas, if 18 goes down, we’re f—ed,” Moore told them. “And we don’t practice f—ed.”

Gruden told Manning about the comment later.

“You can probably debate it in different ways,” Manning says now. “When I got injured in 2011, it sort of showed itself (the Colts went 2-14), but that’s just how we practiced in Indy. We had guys who just didn’t come out — ever. That was how Marvin practiced. I remember when Reggie (Wayne) got there, he was like, ‘Oh, this is how it is?’ So he never came out, either. And if they were in there, I was gonna be in there.”

‘It’s 1-2-3, throw the m—–f—er away. If you don’t, they’re gonna be carrying you out of the stadium boots first.’

As a coach, Moore was rigid and unrelenting, especially with young quarterbacks. This is the line they’d hear if they held onto the ball too long.

“Jim Sorgi probably still hears that in his sleep,” longtime Colts tight end Dallas Clark says. “And then wakes up in a cold sweat.”

For the rookie offensive lineman who jumped too soon: “Son, I hope you come from a rich family, because it’d be a shame you don’t make this team because you can’t stay onside.”

Before the team would break for summer: “Don’t go showing your high school or college coaches our playbook. This is our playbook. These are my plays. Tell your coaches to wake up a little earlier in the morning and come up with their own goddamn plays.”

Eventually, Manning and a few teammates printed off T-shirts with all of Moore’s one-liners.

“He handed those T-shirts out like they were his business cards,” Manning says.

‘We don’t got any Northwesterns on this schedule.’

This was a nod to Moore’s days as Iowa’s starting quarterback, when the Wildcats were a Big Ten bottom-feeder. After the Army, the WFL and five stops in college football, Moore landed a job at the University of Minnesota. That’s where, in the early 1970s, he recruited a talented but temperamental quarterback out of Jackson, Mich.

[ Table of his coaching career]

“Believe it or not, I had a temper back then,” Tony Dungy admits. “I was a yeller and a screamer and a terrible loser, a total hothead.”

Initially, Dungy didn’t even want to visit the campus; he’d never even been on a plane before. It was Moore who finally convinced him. And after Dungy won the starting job, it was Moore who taught him how to keep his emotions in check.

“If you’re gonna be the quarterback for this team, then you’ve gotta be under control,” Moore scolded.

Dungy was the team’s MVP his last two seasons but went undrafted in 1977. He then signed with the Steelers as a defensive back after the team’s new wide receivers coach convinced Noll to give him a shot.

“Without Tom in my life, who knows what would have happened?” Dungy says now.

Twenty-five years later, Dungy landed in Indianapolis as the Colts’ new head coach. Moore was already in place, and Dungy never once considered making a change.

“Now, instead of him telling me what to do, I was his boss,” Dungy says. “It didn’t even seem right.”

‘Pressure is what you feel when you don’t know what you’re doing.’