Saints hire Kellen Moore as head coach: Eagles offensive coordinator lands job after Super Bowl win

The NFL’s 2025 coaching carousel has officially come to halt with the New Orleans Saints making the final head coach hire of the offseason. New Orleans announced it has reached an agreement with Philadelphia Eagles offensive coordinator Kellen Moore to be their next head coach. 

This comes after the Eagles dominated the Kansas City Chiefs to win Super Bowl LIX 40-22.

The 36-year-old Moore coordinated the Eagles to the NFL’s No. 7 scoring offense (27.2 points per game) and No. 8 total offense (367.2 total yards per game) in 2024, his first season in Philadelphia following one year as the Los Angeles Chargers offensive coordinator in 2023. In Moore’s attack, free agent acquisition running back Saquon Barkley became the NFL’s 2024 leader in rushing yards (2,005, making him the ninth in NFL history to rush for 2,000 yards in a season) and scrimmage yards (2,283).

Moore will now be tasked with getting the most out of four-time Pro Bowl quarterback Derek Carr, who will be 34 years old when the 2025 season kicks off. Carr missed seven games in 2024, including the final four with a fracture in his left, non-throwing hand. New Orleans went 5-12 last season in an injury-plagued campaign. They became the first team in NFL history to lose seven games in a row after winning their first two games by 20 or more points while injuries to wide receiver Chris Olave, wide receiver Rashid Shaheed, offensive lineman Erik McCoy, cornerback Paulson Adebo and Carr wrecked the roster. The Saints went 5-5 in Carr’s 10 starts while going 0-7 with backups Spencer Rattler and Jake Haener filling in for him.  

He now completes the meteoric rise from NFL player to head coach in just over a decade. Moore was a backup quarterback his first three NFL seasons (2012-2014) with the Detroit Lions after going undrafted in the wake of a record-setting college career at Boise State. Moore was both Tony Romo and Dak Prescott’s backup with the Cowboys beginning in 2015 before being Prescott’s quarterbacks coach upon his NFL playing career retirement in 2018. Then-Dallas head coach Jason Garrett promoted Moore to be his offensive coordinator in his final season as the Cowboys head coach in 2019, and Moore remained on the Dallas coaching staff as the OC and offensive play-caller upon the hiring of Mike McCarthy to be the team’s head coach in 2020. 

McCarthy let Moore keep offensive play-calling responsibilities despite McCarthy building a career doing just that throughout his head-coaching tenure with the Green Bay Packers. Moore’s Cowboys scoring offenses were top 10 in the NFL in three of his four seasons in Dallas, with the sole exception being in 2020 when Prescott fractured his ankle five games into that year. Once McCarthy decided to take play-calling duties back for the 2023 season, Moore exited for the Chargers. Prescott threw a career-high 37 touchdown passes in the 2021 season, a year the Cowboys led the NFL in scoring offense (31.2 points per game) with Moore calling plays.

Team PPG ranks in NFL with Kellen Moore as OC

* Dak Prescott only played in first five games (Dallas averaged 32.6 PPG, third in the NFL in span)

General manager Mickey Loomis’ roster management filled with constant contract restructures and a refusal to truly rebuild has New Orleans hamstrung entering the offseason. The franchise is $59.5 million over the cap in terms of their effective space, which ranks as the least amount of effective cap space in the NFL, according to OverTheCap.com. However, they’ll begin to have room to operate in 2026 and 2027, so Moore is taking on a job where he isn’t set up to succeed right away even though the Saints have the ninth overall pick in the 2025 NFL Draft.