Feature image from the Michigan Daily/Grace Beal

Who is he?

Moore is the offensive line coach and co-offensive coordinator at Michigan, who you may remember from a certain football game last weekend. He’s in his fourth year on Michigan’s staff but only his first in his current role; prior to that, he spent three years as the tight ends coach, working with guys like Jake Butt, Luke Schoonmaker, and Erick All. (Colston Loveland is a freshman and is working under Grant Newsome.)

Prior to that, he spent five years at Louisville (hmm), three as a grad assistant and two as TE coach. From there, he went to Central Michigan and was TE coach for three years and then picked up associate head coach and recruiting coordinator duties in his final year with the Chippewas.

The work that Moore has done alongside co-OC Matt Weiss (and, presumably, Jim Harbaugh) has been exceptional when it needed to be and effective otherwise. The Wolverines were mostly unchallenged during the regular season and were content simply to pave opponents with their running game; they had uneven success throwing the ball until they really needed it, and then they took advantage of Ohio State’s gambling and lit up the scoreboard in Columbus, setting up the showdown with the Old Gold and Black in Indianapolis.

Why would he be successful at Purdue?

He has a ton of experience in the area - all of his coaching years are in states bordering Indiana. He’s got four years of first-hand experience around an offense in the Big Fourteen Plus Two More Coming Soon, including a very recent game against the very defense he’d be responsible for improving in 2023 and beyond. He’s helping to run an offense that looks very much - in full operation - like what Jeff Brohm wanted to run at Purdue: an offense that can batter you with the run, attack you with the pass, and run RPOs at you to force you to guess and guess wrong.

At 36, he’s got plenty of time to take a shot or two at running the show himself and still recover if it doesn’t work out. Whether or not he’d be staying long-term, it’s easier to imagine an up-and-coming head coach succeeding here than one who’s on his career’s last legs and just wants a few more years in the saddle. And while it’s hard to imagine any of the top guys coming with him, there might be depth players who could play valuable roles at Purdue; perhaps the one glaring weakness in Michigan’s armor is their stubborn approach to NIL, and if Purdue actually has a better setup, it would definitely help to bring guys who already know Moore. (This is particularly puzzling because Michigan is well-known for having a money cannon they can point in just about any direction and they just don’t seem willing to point it at athletes.)

Why could he flop at Purdue?

Similar to his predecessor, Josh Gattis, Moore’s OC experience is at a school where highly-rated talent exists at virtually every position. He will not have the luxury of a five-star quarterback or a five-star running back in West Lafayette, and (at least early on) he’ll quickly discover how challenging it can be when he no longer has a solid, explosive back who can outrun the Ohio State secondary just in case his five-star RB isn’t able to go.

As with Gattis, we can’t be sure how much of the offense is Moore; it wouldn’t be surprising if he was more responsible for the OL part, leaving Weiss (the QB coach) to handle the backs part. Purdue’s OL situation is … not Michigan’s, and that plays a big role in what you can run on offense, as Brohm learned over the years. I think a big thing that reined in Wild Jeff Brohm was the fact that his OL couldn’t necessarily hold off Big Fourteen DL for the time it takes to run some trick plays.

He has no HC experience and only one year as an AHC, and that at a MAC program that was adequate that season (8-5 with a bowl loss to Wyoming). It’s entirely possible that the touch he’s shown at Michigan would be overshadowed by his other HC responsibilities; he could also end up choosing the wrong DC and having that overcome anything he could build on the offensive side of the ball.

Would he come to Purdue?

Almost certainly not? I mean, he’s got a playoff game (or two) to plan for, and he literally can’t coach Purdue at the same time - there is a lot of recruiting that needs to be done, both with high school players and transfer-portal players, and Michigan’s busy practicing for TCU.

Moore has spent four years at a high-level power-conference team that is in its second year in the playoffs. As a young coach, his ceiling seems to be really high right now, and he’s already making seven figures (at least $1.2M, counting bonuses) without having to worry about any HC stuff. If he wanted to leave to run a team, he’d probably be looking at a situation with a high ceiling than Purdue. He’s the highest-paid offensive assistant at Michigan and is on a three-year contract with a team that won two straight conference titles and made Ohio look bad each time; key offensive players are likely to return for the Wolverines, and the opportunity to run that offense again next season is probably enough to keep him locked in Ann Arbor for some time, at least until a plum HC position opens up.

But … he is a co-OC, so if necessary, Weiss (and Harbaugh) could run the offense if he wanted to leave. Harbaugh’s flirtation with the Vikings means that there will always be rumors that can’t be dispelled about him leaving for the NFL. Michigan may think enough of Moore that if that did happen, he’d have a shot at the main job, but maybe he wouldn’t, and Gattis found that situation bad enough to bolt for something that turned out to be a big step down.

Brohm’s contract put him in the top 10 among coaches at public schools reporting salary figures (Pennsylvania schools do not have to disclose this information, neither do private schools). If Bobinski is looking to swing for the fences, it would be reasonable to expect something in that ballpark for a coach Bobinski thinks highly of, especially with the giant TV money coming soon (so much that it’s actually muted the conference’s interest in expanding, since the networks that promised them a certain amount per school seem to be trying to back out once they figured out the Big Many could just keep adding schools). If bonuses and supplemental compensation pushed the number high enough, would Moore be willing to leave?

I still think the answer is no. Sure, he could maybe triple his salary here, but if Michigan has another big year next season and the right job opens up somewhere, he could make 4x or 5x what he’s making now.

But you never know …