Eagles OC Kellen Moore: 'Everyone Deals With The Unknown In The NFL'

The new Eagles offense will be facing off against a rebooted Green Bay defense on Friday night.

Eagles OC Kellen Moore / John McMullen/Eagles on SI

PHILADELPHIA - For Vic Fangio, Week 1 against Green Bay is not unchartered territory.

“They're pretty much the same team that they were last year, that they ended the season with,” the Eagles’ new defensive coordinator said when discussing Matt LaFleur’s offense. “Unfortunately, they were playing really good the last half of the year and into the playoffs, and they're really good on offense. 

“... [Week 1s] can be a problem, but not in this case. Same staff, same offense, basically the same players except for [Packers RB} Josh Jacobs.”

For Kellen Moore, that’s not the case because Green Bay has shifted DCs, ironically from a Fangio-inspired scheme run by Joe Barry, now the linebackers coach and defensive run game coordinator with the Miami Dolphins.

The new defensive chief for the Packers is former Boston College head coach Jeff Hafley, a bold hire by Lafleur, who started his head-coaching career with three consecutive 13-win seasons before falling to 8-9 in 2022 and 9-8 last season, the first in the post-Aaron Rodgers era.

“A lot of people face this in football in general and certainly in the NFL, where you're facing an opponent that has a lot of unknown, whether personnel or scheme,” Moore said. 

The goal is to dive into Hafley’s history and the DNA he revealed at BC as well as when he was the co-defensive coordinator at Ohio State. For NFL purposes, Hafley was the secondary coach with Tampa Bay in 2013, as well as Cleveland (2014-15) and San Francisco (2016-18) which could reveal some coverage proclivities.

“You draw awareness of the different dots that you can connect with whether it be coaches, players, all the different circumstances,” Moore said.

In the end, however, you never really know what to expect and teh goal is to be ready to adapt and improvise as needed.

“You understand early in the season, everyone deals with unknown in the NFL,” said Moore. “It can be a returning group that has been together for 10 years. They're going to evolve in some capacity during the off-season.”

“You definitely have to emphasize that there's going to be an element of new,” Moore continues. “You lean heavily on what you've invested a lot of time in, things that people feel confident with, understand what the tools are and what the adjustments need to be made throughout a game, and we understand that adjustment football will be a part of this.”

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