On The Job Training

Declan Doyle to Hone His Play-Calling Chops in Real Time

Look, I get the skepticism. You hire a 29-year-old (now 30) to run an offense he never called a play for, and the natural Baltimore reaction is: what exactly are we buying here?

Fair question. Let’s answer it with receipts.

When Ben Johnson picked Doyle in January 2025, the job description was never a mystery. Johnson made it clear – he would keep calling plays in Chicago, and he prioritized finding a coach whose largest responsibility would be helping him game plan for each week’s opponent. That’s not a demotion dressed up in a title. That’s the job!

The Sun-Times put it plainly. Doyle was the vice president of the Bears’ offense — real authority, but nobody quite knew what he did. The offense was Johnson’s. Doyle’s job was to make Johnson’s job easier. He was the table-setter. Doyle himself didn’t flinch at the label. He talked about being on the same page with the play-caller, spending enormous time in film study with Johnson, and making sure he saw the game the way Johnson saw it.

So, if you want clarity into what Doyle’s to-do list looked like, well it was probably a bit lengthier than his qualified title suggests.

One: the weekly build. Doyle ran meetings and helped set up Johnson’s plan for the week. When a first-time head coach is buried in the other 52 things head coaches do, somebody has to own Monday through Saturday. That was Doyle.

Two: teaching. He was the room. He was the install. That is not glamour work, but it’s the work that shows up during critical moments in a game.

Three: the sideline. Doyle worked the sideline while Press Taylor sat in the booth as passing game coordinator., Johnson leaned on both of them to “feed me the story” — what was working, who was blowing assignments, what the opponent’s coverage tendencies looked like. That’s a coordinator processing a live game and compressing it into something a play-caller can act on in eleven seconds.

Four: the second half. Chicago was ridiculous after intermission. The Bears led the league in offensive EPA per play in the second half, jumping from 5.3 yards per play before the break to 6.1 after — second-best in the NFL. Doyle was publicly working that problem all year. Asked in September whether the Bears were scripting plays to open the second half, he said it was absolutely something they gave thought to, and he hammered on cleaning up penalties and fundamentals coming out of the tunnel.

The result? A Chicago offense that finished sixth in yards and ninth in scoring, with a rushing attack third in the league at 144.5 yards per game. And a coach regarded around the league as a rising star.

He never called a play. He built everything around the ones that got called.

Now he calls them for the Ravens. And if you listen to the man who stirs the drink of Baltimore’s offense, opponents beware.

The Ravens are coming!

“I don’t believe a defense is prepared for what’s in store for them.” 

Ravens 2x MVP quarterback Lamar Jackson is fired up about the team’s new offensive scheme.#RavensFlock | @AdamSchein pic.twitter.com/CPwxAzKpck

— Mad Dog Sports Radio (@MadDogRadio) September 2, 2026

Weaver’s New Lane: Same Title, Different Sunday

On flip side is defensive coordinator Anthony Weaver. Let’s dispense with the tired narrative first: Anthony Weaver did not take a demotion.

Yes, Jesse Minter made clear at his introductory presser that he’d be calling the defensive plays in Baltimore. And yes, Weaver spent the past two seasons in Miami as the Dolphins’ defensive coordinator and play-caller. So the man who was a finalist for this very head coaching job — and who interviewed with Atlanta, Arizona, Buffalo and Pittsburgh — surrendered the headset call sheet to work for the guy who beat him out. Feels like a professional concession to remain gamefully employed, right? Or maybe ego has been checked at the front door of 1 Winning Drive for the benefit of the team.

“I come into this with no ego, and I know Jesse’s the same way,” Weaver said.

Monday through Saturday

Let’s dig into where Weaver earns his check. The Athletic’s Jeff Zrebiec framed it plainly: Weaver will lead defensive meetings, help with the game plan and scouting, and work with the team’s defensive linemen. The Sun’s Bennett Conlin added that Weaver is an ideal hire to help design game plans and develop players throughout the course of a season — and that Minter didn’t need someone to call plays, but Weaver has the chops if Minter ever wants to delegate.

Translation: Weaver runs the room. He teaches. He fixes the pass rush that vanished in 2025. And he does it with built-in equity — he coached Nnamdi Madubuike, Travis Jones and Broderick Washington, and overlapped with Kyle Hamilton and Roquan Smith. That matters when you’re installing a new system.

Sundays

He’s on the grass, not upstairs. Doyle took the booth for the offense; Minter calls the defense from the field, leaving Weaver a different role during games. Weaver spent the preseason auditioning his own job description: “I am still going to try to figure out exactly what that is and where I can be most helpful… just making sure that I am not wasting the wisdom that I have gathered throughout the years on the sideline.”

By late August, he’d found it. “Jess and I, there’s a beautiful yin yang of football knowledge. He’s been a back-seven guy by trade. I’ve been a front-end guy by trade, and we’ve both called it, so we have big picture views. On game day, I primarily focus on the front end first. He primarily focuses on the back end first, and we come together and see what we think.”

The Education of Mike Macdonald

All of the talk about Minter, Doyle and Weaver calls to mind former Ravens DC Mike Macdonald who as you know, has moved on to skipper birds of a different feather – the Seattle Seahawks. Since 2022, the Super Bowl LX Champion’s career trajectory has been propelled by rocket fuel.

Macdonald didn’t walk into the Castle as the next Dick LeBeau. He wasn’t even the next Chuck Pagano. When John Harbaugh handed the defense to the Massachusetts native in January of 2022, he handed it to a 34-year-old whose entire résumé as a coordinator amounted to one season in Ann Arbor working for John’s brother Jim.

And in Week 2, the Flock found out exactly what that meant.

You remember it. You’ve try not to but the PTSD is real. Baltimore up 35-14 at home. Enter Sandman rocks The Bank as the fourth quarter is about to start. But the person rocking the most was Tua Tagovailoa who shredded Macdonald’s defense to the tune of 469 yards and six touchdowns, four of them in the fourth quarter. A 42-38 loss on your own field. Harbaugh, to his credit, didn’t hide behind coachspeak afterward — he said flatly that the Ravens couldn’t have that many balls thrown over their heads, and that it wasn’t OK no matter who was back there.

That was the bill coming due on a philosophy change. Wink Martindale’s Ravens blitzed a league-high 45.3% in 2020 and 32.4% in 2021, per Next Gen Stats. Macdonald arrived preaching something different — not less aggression, he insisted, but a different kind. Keep the offense from believing what it’s seeing. Fake pressure. Show one coverage, play another. Beautiful in a meeting room. In September, against Mike McDaniel and two of the fastest men alive (Jaylen Waddle, Tyreek Hill), it was a science experiment conducted in public. The results were embarrassing.

Then the injuries piled on. Marcus Williams, the $70 million safety who had three picks in his first five games, dislocated his wrist against Cincinnati in Week 5 and landed on IR. Geno Stone and a rookie named Kyle Hamilton were suddenly load-bearing.

By Halloween, the numbers were ugly. ESPN pegged the Ravens at 22.9 points allowed per game — 20th in the league, on pace for the worst scoring defense in Baltimore since 2015. NFL.com had them 28th in yards. That’s not a Ravens defense. That’s an imposter.

So, Eric DeCosta went and got Roquan Smith for a second, a fifth and A.J. Klein.

And here’s where it gets fun.

Smith didn’t just fill the middle; he unlocked the scheme. All that disguise and simulated pressure Macdonald had been drawing up needed a linebacker who could diagnose it and run to it. Over the final nine regular season games, the Ravens allowed more than 16 points exactly twice. Baltimore finished third in the NFL in points allowed at 315, an average of 18.5 per game, per Pro Football Reference — a wild reversal from where they sat on trade deadline day.

The lesson isn’t that Macdonald got bailed out by a trade. It’s that a first-time NFL play caller diagnosed his own defense mid-season, simplified where he had to, and built the thing back around the piece he was given.

He got smarter in real time. Not many coordinators do.

The point here is that first-time coordinators are exactly plug-and-play future Hall of Famers. It takes work, talent, teaching skills and communication. Macdonald has that. Doyle has that. But even in the case of the NFL’s new super coach who has only strengthened his reputation via HBO’s Hard Knocks, it takes time. There will be growing pains.

Fortunately for Doyle and the Ravens, the first quarter of their schedule, on paper, looks like a cupcake. But the NFL isn’t played on paper.

Let’s hope that during those precious seconds between plays, Doyle doesn’t get lost in his paper.

You know, like Anthony Weaver’s predecessor at DC.

You’ve heard the players rave about Declan Doyle all offseason. Now see why for yourself.

Check out Wired right now: https://t.co/FHwqKSF8Hm pic.twitter.com/iaUwOnJERC

— Baltimore Ravens (@Ravens) July 23, 2026

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Source: https://russellstreetreport.com/2026/09/05/lombardis-way/declan-doyle-play-caller/