Petersen disciple now WRs coach at Fresno St.

By Todd Milles

The News Tribune

For most of his life, Kirby Moore had had two prominent head-coaching voices in his ear.

One is his father, Tom, who was his coach at Prosser High School.

And the other is Chris Petersen, his coach at Boise State who is now at the University of Washington.

Well, add a third — his newest boss, Jeff Tedford, who is trying to resurrect a down-spiraling Fresno State program in the Mountain West Conference. Moore is his full-time wide receivers coach.

“It’s been great,” Moore said after practice Wednesday morning. “Obviously I was fortunate to work with Coach Tedford at Washington, and when he got this job, I got an opportunity to come down here.”

If the name sounds sort of familiar, you might be confusing him with his older brother, Kellen, who is Boise State’s all-time leading passer (14,667 yards, 142 touchdown passes from 2008-11), and is now with the Dallas Cowboys.

Kirby Moore caught a lot of those passes from him in high school and college. In fact, the younger Moore holds the national prep record for career touchdown receptions with 95.

But at Boise State, he was a part-time starter and never really excelled to be a top receiving option for Petersen.

After graduating in 2014, he spent one season at the College of Idaho as the receivers coach before reuniting with Petersen as a graduate assistant a year later.

“He’s a lot like his brother — both of those guys are soft-spoken guys,” Petersen said. “But they’re really smart, and really into football.”

Moore mainly helped out with the UW receivers, but had other duties on the offensive side of the ball.

“He’s just a smart, efficient worker,” Petersen said. “You ask him to do something, and it’s done better than you thought it would be.”

Last season, Tedford was brought aboard at the UW as an offensive consultant. That is when Moore first met the former coach from California.

“I would not say we had a crazy amount of interraction, but there was a bit of discussion in film (review) and game-planning,” Moore said.

Two weeks before last year’s Apple Cup, Tedford was hired to become Fresno State’s new coach, replaying Tim DeRuyter.

And a few days after the Huskies dispatched of Colorado in the Pac-12 title game, Moore was hired as a member of Tedford’s staff.

“I was definitely surprised he wanted me, just becase I know with his success, there was a number of people he had worked with,” Moore said.

In anticipation of this week’s matchup at Husky Stadium against the Bulldogs, Petersen acknowledged that both Tedford and Moore know a lot about the inner workings of the UW program.

“Kirby probably knows more than (Tedford) about our operations,” Petersen said. “Those are some things we pay attention to, for sure.”

When asked if Moore was reluctant to turn in his UW playbook, or had secrets worth sharing on the Huskies with his players, he laughed.

“There’s nothing operationally we will have an edge on,” Moore said.

But Moore certainly knows the “Coach Pete” way.

“I learned a lot about myself at the UW, and got to work with a ton of different people and see things,” Moore said. “It all kind of got me out of my comfort zone, honestly.”