Many, many people have given their lives to the game of football. Few have given more of their time than longtime NFL assistant Tom Moore, emphasis on long.
On Thursday, Moore, 87, announced his retirement after 62 years in coaching and 46 at the NFL level.
Bucs senior offensive consultant Tom Moore has decided to retire after 62 years of coaching and more than 46 seasons in the NFL. He’s 87.
— Rick Stroud (@NFLSTROUD) January 8, 2026
Consider the following: Moore entered college football in 1958, the same year NASA was founded, and only four years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The NFL had a roster of 12 teams then. Moore was a quarterback on Iowa's 1958 national champion team (coached by College Football Hall of Famer Forest Evashevski, born in 1918), and entered coaching at his alma mater in 1961. He never left, until today.
Moore's last full-time, on-the-field coaching role came as the offensive coordinator for the Indianapolis Colts from 1998-08, which means no one did more to develop Peyton Manning from talented rookie into NFL legend than him. Never a head coach, Moore coordinated offenses for Wake Forest, the World Football League's New York Stars, Minnesota, the Pittsburgh Steelers, Detroit Lions and Colts. He won two Super Bowls as an assistant with the late '70s Steelers, one as coordinator with the Colts, and one as a consultant for the Tampa Bay Bucs. Moore called plays for Terry Bradshaw, Barry Sanders, and Manning.
Moore is one of the few assistant coaches in a hall of fame, entering the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame in 2014. He was given the Paul "Dr. Z" Zimmerman Lifetime Achievement Award by the Pro Football Writers of America in 2015... and then spent another decade in the league.
My second year we were going up to Foxboro and and the week before Marvin and I had thrown kind of a slant and go for a touchdown," Manning recalled to NFL Films for a documentary on Moore. "So I came to him before the game in Foxboro I said hey Tom Marvin and I have been working on kind of a slant go slant right and I still remember like it was yesterday very first drive we got done about the 15 yard line and he said:
'Ok Peyton here we go. Let's go Dice right, scat right... uh... just run whatever the **** you and Marvin been working on.'
And we called it and we scored a touchdown."
Hall of Fame players coached by Moore range from Bradshaw (born 1948) to Mike Evans (born 1993). Here is Moore's full player and coaching bio, via Wikipedia:
-- Iowa quarterback (1958-60)
-- Iowa graduate assistant (1961-62)
-- Dayton running backs coach (1965-68)
-- Wake Forest offensive coordinator (1969)
-- Georgia Tech running backs coach (1970-71)
-- Minnesota running backs coach (1972-73)
-- New York Stars offensive coordinator (1974)
-- Minnesota offensive coordinator (1975-76)
-- Pittsburgh Steelers wide receivers coach (1977-82)
-- Pittsburgh Steelers offensive coordinator (1983-89)
-- Minnesota Vikings assistant head coach for offense (1990-93)
-- Detroit Lions offensive coordinator (1994-96)
-- New Orleans Saints running backs coach (1997)
-- Indianapolis Colts offensive coordinator (1998-08)
-- Indianapolis Colts senior offensive consultant (2009-10)
-- New York Jets offensive consultant (2011)
-- Tennessee Titans offensive consultant (2012)
-- Arizona Cardinals assistant head coach/offensive consultant (2013-17)
-- Tampa Bay Buccaneers offensive consultant (2019-25)