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Meet the man behind Oklahoma football, by Dillon Phillips, The Oklahoma Daily
Pete Moris’s office is a bit of a mess.
One part coach’s office and one part dive bar, it’s covered with mementos from the OU assistant athletic director and director of communications’ past — its tabletops and walls so cluttered with NFL memorabilia, knickknacks and keepsakes, that half a dozen picture frames sit on the floor, leaning against the wall until the day comes when they finally can find a place to hang among the others.
These items document Moris’s history and disjointed journey from Wisconsin to Iowa to Indianapolis to Florida to Kansas City back to Wisconsin and finally to Norman. Along the way, he’s ascended through the ranks of football front offices across the country.
Now a 20-year veteran of the sports information field, he heads the communications department at Oklahoma. While the job allows Moris to stay close to the sport he’s loved since he was a kid, it hasn’t been easy on him. Or anyone, for that matter.
“It’s relentless,” said Kenny Mossman, OU senior associate athletics director and director of external operations. “It doesn’t take a day off, especially during the season, but even outside the season it can be the kind of job that stays in your face 24-7.”
In Moris’s current capacity, he acts as the media liaison for the football team and oversees the communications departments for OU’s 20 other varsity sports teams. While the job isn’t for everyone, Moris said, he believes the work ethic his parents instilled in him has allowed him to manage his work diligently.
“I grew up with people who—that’s kind of what they did—they worked,” Moris said. “They worked. They went to church. And then they went to sleep.”
Moris was born on Oct. 30, 1970, in Mount Hope, a small town in Grant County in rural southwest Wisconsin. The only child of dairy farmers, Moris took an interest in sports at an early age, especially football, thanks to the popularity of the Green Bay Packers.
Unfortunately for Moris, pickup games in his backyard or at recess or after school were the only opportunities he had to play the game he so loved—Grant County was too small to field 22-man football teams.
“I kind of had to live vicariously through watching it on TV and kind of playing in the backyard,” Moris said. “So then when I kind of had the opportunity to work in football, you still kind of live vicariously through those players and coaches.”
Unable to play football, Moris still had an itch for athletics, so he chose to pursue basketball. By the time he graduated from West Grant High School in 1989—a graduating class of a whopping 25 people, Moris said—he had become a team captain.
After high school, Moris attended Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, where he also played basketball.
But Moris soon realized his future wasn’t in basketball. After his sophomore season, Moris sat down with his coach, former Wisconsin assistant and Saint Louis coach Brad Soderberg, to talk about his career plans. Moris had yet to declare a major, but Soderberg asked him, point black, where he saw himself in five years.
Half-joking, Moris said he wanted to be the general manager of the Packers. Soderberg asked him what he was doing to get there.
Moris was taken aback by his coach’s directness, but Soderberg persisted. He told Moris to come back in a week with a plan to become the next GM of the Packers.
“That kind of got the wheels turning,” Moris said.
From there, Moris started working in Loras’s sports information office and began compiling a portfolio. After his junior year, he started applying for internships in NFL front offices.
The summer between his junior and senior year, Moris received a training-camp internship with the Indianapolis Colts. During Moris’s four-week internship, the team’s director of media content, Craig Kelley, quickly learned Moris’s work ethic set him apart from the other interns.
“He was willing to go whatever path it took to get where he wanted to go,” Kelley said.
Upon graduating from Loras, Moris took a year-long internship with the University of Florida’s sports information office, where he saw now-OU coach Lon Kruger lead the Gators to their first ever Final Four appearance.
After completing that internship, Moris hunted for a full-time position, recruiting the help of Kelley to search for openings. Just prior to the start of the 1994 season, Moris got an internship with the Kansas City Chiefs. His boss, now-Chiefs Historian Bob Moore, noticed the same qualities in Moris that Kelley mentioned.
“You put him in a room with five other people, and he becomes the top guy because he outworks them all,” Moore said.
Moris worked his way up to a full-time position and continued to climb the Chiefs’ ranks. In 2002, he became the associate director of public relations — a position he would hold until he left the organization.
But after the 2010 season, with the franchise still reeling from the 2006 death of owner and founder Lamar Hunt and uncertainty about the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement looming, the Chiefs fired 11 employees. Moris was one of them.
“I was there for 17 years and kept coming to work until they told me not to come to work,” Moris said. “I love Kansas City, love the Chiefs. It was a great place to work, but it was kind of a perfect storm of a lot of different things.”
But Moris’s fortune soon would change for the better.
In February of 2012, Mossman—who had met Moris while Moris was working in Kansas City, Mossman said—contacted him about the newly vacated director of communications position, the job Mossman previously held.
“He wanted to know if I was interested in talking about this position, and obviously, I was,” Moris said. “So here I am.”
In his short time at OU—Moris is in just his second season—Moris has impressed, Mossman said.
“He’s embraced the things that we’ve asked him to do,” Mossman said. “I think anybody that has the innate enthusiasm that Pete does for his work really puts himself in a good position on a daily basis because he comes to work, not with a chip on his shoulder, but looking for the next opportunity.”
What you can’t deduce about Pete Moris from the walls of his office or the kind words of his coworkers, he’ll flat-out tell you: He’s just a big kid who’s doing what he loves.
“To use a Bob (Stoops) line, ‘People don’t change, they just get older,’” Moris said. “To me, I’m still in a lot of ways the kid who loved football growing up in Mount Hope, Wisconsin, and now I’m just lucky enough to get paid to love football and sports.”