Archie Manning remembers Kellen Moore coming to the Manning Passing Academy at Thibodaux, Louisiana, as a counselor during the summer of 2010, just before Moore’s junior season at Boise State.

Moore had just turned 22. But, said Manning, “He looked like he was 12.”

“I remember him as a really nice, polite kid, a left-hander” Manning said. “He was a coach’s son. His daddy was a legendary high school coach in Washington (state). I remember that he didn’t have the arm strength that a lot of the quarterbacks we bring in have. He wasn’t a big guy, but he was really accurate and he knew where to go with the ball. He impressed me as being really, really smart, ahead of the game. As so many coaches’ sons do, he really understood the game.

“I don’t know how much he got from us, but he must have enjoyed the camp and gotten something out of it because he came back the next year.”

Yes, and Moore has enjoyed south Louisiana a lot lately. Sunday, in the Superdome, he called the plays for the Philadelphia Eagles in their Super Bowl trouncing of the two-time defending NFL champion Kansas City Chiefs. He was back in the Crescent City Wednesday to start his new job as head coach of the New Orleans Saints.

Fixing the Saints will be much more difficult than torching the Chiefs, and we will get to that shortly. But first some more background on Moore, who will not turn 37 until July. Most college football fans will remember Moore for his remarkable four-year run as the starting quarterback at Boise. After redshirting as a freshman, he led the Broncos to a ridiculous 50-3 record over the next four seasons 2008-11. Southern Miss fans should recall that in 2008, Moore’s freshman season, Boise State came to Hattiesburg and trounced a good Jeff Bower-coached Southern Miss team 24-7. For his Boise career, he completed 70% of his passes for nearly 15,000 yards. He threw for 142 touchdowns, compared to just 28 interceptions. Clearly, he was really accurate and did know where to go with the football, which was quite often into the end zone.

Despite all those gaudy statistics, Moore was not drafted. He wasn’t quite six feet tall and, again, he lacked elite arm strength. He signed as a free agent with the Detroit Lions and played sparingly over six NFL seasons with the Lions and the Cowboys, retiring in 2017.

The Cowboys, who saw firsthand Moore’s football knowledge, hired him in 2018 as their quarterbacks coach. In 2019, at age 32 he was promoted to offensive coordinator. He has also served, successfully, as offensive coordinator of the San Diego Chargers (2023) and, of course, the Eagles last season. Perhaps the best way to put into perspective his contributions to the Eagles’ championship run is this: In 2023, Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts threw 15 interceptions and had a passer rating of 89.1. Under Moore, Hurts threw just five interceptions and had a passer rating of 103.7. That’s a huge, huge jump.

No doubt, naysayers will point out that calling successful plays with Hurts throwing and running, A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith catching, and Saquon Barkley running should not be confused with inventing the wheel. And those same critics will correctly say Moore won’t have that many highly skilled weapons to work with in New Orleans. (He also will not have the same quality offensive line wearing black and gold as he had wearing green and silver.)

Other critics will question whether a guy who will have just turned 37 when the 2025 Saints begin training camp will have the experience (both football- and management-wise) to command an NFL coaching staff and football team. And, frankly, given the choice I probably would have at least gauged the interest of highly successful Baltimore Ravens’ offensive coordinator Todd Monken before hiring a guy 23 years younger and with far less experience, none as a head coach.

But we all know Sean McVay coached the Los Angeles Rams to the Super Bowl at age 32 and won it all at age 36. You don’t have to have a gray beard to coach football. That said, Moore is only a year older than Saints defensive stars Demario Davis and Cam Jordan. A bigger problem for Moore is that the league’s youngest head coach will inherit one of the league’s oldest rosters. At the risk of mixing cliches, the Saints are as long in the tooth as their new coach is wet behind the ears.

Manning, who still closely watches his hometown team, put it this way: “Kellen’s got his hands full. The Saints have some issues.”

The biggest of those: The Saints are a league-worst $54 million over the NFL salary cap. Some of those salaries must be slashed or eliminated. The league’s youngest head coach faces huge decisions, beginning with what to do about quarterback. Go with Derek Carr? Or start over and go younger? The Saints do have the ninth pick of the upcoming draft. That’s just for starters. As Manning put it, the Saints have issues, as in plural. It’s hard to get a whole lot better while chopping the payroll so drastically.

This all will be interesting to watch. And we should all remember what happened the last time the Saints hired a young, former Dallas Cowboys offensive coordinator as their young head coach. Sean Payton, like Moore, had never been a head coach before he took the Saints job. That worked out pretty well, did it not?

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

An effort to create a statewide board to study domestic violence deaths to uncover trends and guide opportunities for intervention, support and policy unanimously passed both legislative bodies. 

Senate Bill 2886 by Brice Wiggins, R-Pascagoula, passed last week and House Bill 1551 by Fabian Nelson, D-Byram, passed Wednesday. Now both bills will head to the opposite chamber and are expected to be heard in committee. 

“When we see domestic violence incidents, they’re just counted as murder and the person is charged with murder and guess what? It’s not looked at any more, it’s not picked up to see what could we have done to stop it from getting here,” said Nelson on the House floor before the bill passed. 

The idea behind the legislation came through the Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which represents survivors, shelters and advocates. 

Supporters have said data from a review board can help shelters and other providers see gaps in services and find ways to decrease and prevent domestic violence fatalities. They also see it as a way to encourage collaboration among shelters, the medical system, law enforcement, courts and other systems. 

The board could look at information from a number of sources including whether the victim had any domestic abuse protection orders and whether law enforcement was called multiple times to a location, well as medical and mental health records, court documents and prison records on parole and probation.  

“We have to keep people alive, but to do that, we have to have the infrastructure as a system to appropriately respond to these things,” Stacey Riley, executive director of the Gulf Coast Center for Nonviolence and a board member of the Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence, told Mississippi Today. 

Passage of the bills come after a year where nearly 100 Mississippians died in domestic violence homicides, according to data compiled by Mississippi Today. 

After the 2024 legislative session, Mississippi Today began to track domestic violence fatalities similar to the way the review board would do. The organization’s compilation of data found 80 incidents that resulted in at least 100 deaths.

Victims were mostly women killed by male partners, which is in line with national statistics and trends about intimate partner violence. Other victims included men – victims and perpetrators – and a few children. Domestic incidents were also family violence between children, parents, grandparents and other members. 

Most of the compiled deaths involved a firearm, which research has shown is involved in more than half of homicides committed by an intimate partner. 

Both bills this session would create a board with appointed members with backgrounds in domestic violence, health and criminal justice – people who interact with victims and survivors. 

The Senate version would place the board under the Department of Public Safety, while the House version would place the board in the State Department of Health, which has similar boards that review child and maternal deaths. 

Last year, a bill that would have created the review board did not make it out of committee. 

Mississippi is one of several states without a domestic violence fatality review board, and without collecting information about fatalities, advocates say it’s difficult to know how many deaths and injuries there are in the state in any year. 

Meanwhile, several other domestic violence bills did not advance out of committee this session, including ones that proposed making second domestic violence conviction a felony, allowing judges to hold people charged with domestic violence for at least 24 hours, letting certain courts issue temporary protection orders and establishing domestic abuse court programs. 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

A bill that would allow some Mississippi parents to use taxpayer money to pay for private school does not have the support to pass this session, House leaders said Wednesday.  

The early demise of one of Republican House Speaker Jason White’s top policy priorities came after proponents and opponents battled to sway lawmakers. As outside forces lobbied lawmakers, they were themselves engaged in closed-door jockeying. In a private House Republican caucus meeting on Tuesday, White discovered the GOP majority could not reach an agreement.

“You probably won’t see us take up that bill,” White said on Wednesday. “We don’t have a consensus.”

House Education Chairman Rob Roberson’s legislation, House Bill 1433, would have allowed students who were enrolled in a district rated D or F within the past five years to use the state portion of their base student cost — money that would normally go to their local public school — and use it to pay for private school tuition. Students could only use the money at a private school if there were not an A- or B-rated district willing to accept them within 30 miles of their home.

Proponents of the legislation said it would give parents greater autonomy to customize their children’s education. White touted the proposal as a key component in a package of education bills that align with President Donald Trump’s executive order promoting “school choice.”

“School choice, whether anybody in this circle or this Capitol likes it, is coming,” White said. “You have a president who was elected with a national mandate who has made it one of his top priorities. You have a ruby red state in Mississippi who voted overwhelmingly for President Trump.”

The bill also prompted consternation among opponents, who argued the proposed law was unconstitutional and could undermine public schools serving some of the state’s neediest students. The legislation also does not cover transportation costs for students who wish to transfer to schools outside their home district, an omission that Democrats said would limit opportunities for poor families.

But ideological and practical disagreements among House Republicans ultimately sank the bill. Some Republicans felt it didn’t go far enough and wanted universal school choice. Others wanted to start with a pilot program. And there was a cloud of uncertainty around the Trump administration, which has floated eliminating the U.S. Department of Education and making drastic spending cuts.

READ MORE: Sending taxpayer money to private schools advances in Mississippi House

“So we’re all over the place in exactly what it looks like, and it was tough to find consensus on that,” White said. “It seemed like not finding a consensus and then a president who said the federal government is fixing to get involved in this in the way that we send federal money to states, it was probably good for us to hit the pause button and figure out what looks like.”

The bill passed out of the House Education Committee on a voice vote last week after Roberson denied Democrats’ request for a roll call where each member’s vote could be recorded.

In conversations with committee members, three Republicans told Mississippi Today they would have voted no. Five Republicans declined to reveal how they would have voted and two Republicans said they favored advancing the bill out of committee but were unsure how they would have voted had the bill come before the full House. All the Democrats on the committee reached by Mississippi Today said they opposed the bill.

Rep. Dana McLean, a Republican from Columbus, walked out of the committee meeting when the bill came up for debate. McLean declined to comment on how she would have voted on the measure and walked away from reporters when pressed for more specifics. McLean will likely have to run in a special election this year because of redistricting.

Opponents said it was clear the bill did not have the votes to advance out of committee, so Roberson advanced the measure on a voice vote with uncertain results. White — who pointed out that voice votes are common practice under the Legislature’s procedures — also acknowledged that members might have wanted to spare themselves from taking a tough vote.

“This won’t surprise you, but some members don’t want to be on the roll call in committee, on both sides of the aisle,” White said.

According to multiple House members, White asked Republican House members to simply advance the measure out of the Committee, but he did not suggest it would pass the full House chamber on the floor.

READ MORE: House passes bill to make switching public K-12 school districts easier

As those discussions between lawmakers were taking place in private, public school advocates waged a furious campaign to scuttle the bill ahead of a Thursday legislative deadline.

Mississippi Professional Educators, the state’s largest teachers union, warned in an email to supporters that pro-school choice lobbyists were polling House members over the weekend on whether they supported House Bill 1433.

They also said the legislation would open the door to a wider-reaching policy in the future that would allow all public school students in the state to use taxpayer money for private schools, not just those who attend D or F rated schools.

“If HB 1433 should make it through the legislative process and be passed into law, it opens the door for universal school choice and vouchers in our state,” wrote Kelly Riley, the union’s executive director.

White confirmed on Wednesday that some Republican House members support such a policy.

The school choice push has been intertwined with debates over race and class in education. Those against school choice say the policies could effectively re-segregate schools. School choice supporters say some high-performing school districts fight school choice measures to avoid accepting students from poor and minority backgrounds.

White said school choice measures — which also include making it easier for students to transfer between public schools and attend charter schools — improve competition and student outcomes.

Even as House Bill 1433 appeared dead, the House passed another bill that would increase the number of charter schools in the state. The bill would allow charter schools to open in an additional 31-35 districts, which Democrats said would further starve existing public schools of resources.

It is not clear whether that bill has enough support to pass the Senate, where school choice measures have been a tougher sell.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.