Mayo will have to go through the All-Ireland qualifiers for the fourth consecutive season following their one-point loss to Roscommon last weekend.
The defeat means Mayo will once again have to start their championship run in July with Mayo registering 16 wides despite scoring 17 points.
Kevin McLoughlin missed a late free that could won Mayo the game but Moran insists that there was more to the Westerners defeat than just their inefficiency in front of goal.
“I think there were a lot of differences,” Moran told reporters at Supervalu’s launch of their 10th season as a sponsor of the All-Ireland SFC..
“When you look at football and you break it down and you actually look at what happened during the game, efficiency in front of goal was one of them, of course.
“But we got 17 points. You could say Roscommon were more efficient, but I think there’s a lot more to the structure of the game and that’s what we were looking at last night in training and we’ll just move on and learn from it.
“The simple fact about it is that they scored two goals to win the game. You have to be scoring goals in Championship football to win matches and we didn’t do that. That’s the big learning we will take from it. We didn’t create the goal-chances to go and win the game.”
Moran said the Mayo squad probably assumed that they were going to coast through the Connacht championship following their dominant final win over Sligo in 2015 but he added that the strength of Galway and Roscommon in recent years has made it much harder to come through the province.
“Yeah, I think it shows the importance of really going after something,” said Moran.
“In ’15 we came out of a Connacht Championship that we’d strolled through. We probably thought that was going to happen for a couple of years after it.
“We put a big emphasis on winning the All-Ireland and probably took our eye off the ball in Connacht and now we’re struggling to get back into it.
“So the next team that wins that Connacht Championship it’ll be a sweet one for them. We went after it this year and it just didn’t happen for us.
“Plus, you’ve three Division 1 teams in Connacht, you know? You’re not going to get anything easy. You seen the way Roscommon performed and they went down and so did Cavan.
“But the two of them have now won in the Championship because every game they lost they only lost by three or four points, max, and it just shows how competitive it is.”
Mayo came in for significant criticism after the defeat to Roscommon with RTE pundit Joe Brolly claiming that ‘it is more enthralling watching Mayo losing, than watching any other team winning’.
Moran likened the coverage to the early Match of the Day presentations and added that he’s learned to block out the criticism over the last few years.
“The more pundits make noise, the more they get heard,” said the forward.
“I suppose it’s different for me. I’m 35, I’ve probably seen a lot of it in the past. It might be different for a 23 or 24-year-old. But for me it genuinely doesn’t make any difference.
“They say their piece. When we were young we used to watch Match of the Day, you had Hansen…it’s the same thing. It’s the exact same thing.
“You can either take it and use it to benefit yourself or you just don’t listen to it. If you can convince yourself the stuff you’re doing is right, you don’t really have to listen to it. It’s more supporters’ analysis if I’m being honest. But if I was mid-20s I might take it a bit different, you know?”
