Anthony Weaver does not demand credit. He returned to Baltimore seeking connection.

The grin, used to punctuate an anecdote or an observation on football life, folds you in — and, suddenly, you’re a confidant.

The bulging upper body reminds you that he once menaced quarterbacks as a 6-foot-3, 290-pound defensive end for the Ravens and Houston Texans. But these days warmth is Anthony Weaver’s most potent tool.

What word did Ravens coach Jesse Minter use in February to describe the man he’d just hired to become his chief defensive lieutenant?

“Connector.”

It’s why Calais Campbell, as weathered and respected a player as you’ll find in today’s NFL, calls Weaver his favorite coach ever.

It’s why Minter trusted a guy he didn’t know that well, a guy who might have felt aggrieved at not getting the Ravens’ head coaching job himself, to help him win the hearts and minds of a largely unfamiliar locker room.

Weaver, 46, has interviewed unsuccessfully for nine NFL head coach openings. He has called the defense for two previous employers, including the Miami Dolphins in 2024 and 2025. He took what some viewed as a step backward, implementing the defensive vision of a younger, less seasoned coach who beat him out for a job he wanted.

So why does the man everyone calls “Weave” seem so at ease as he embarks on his third chapter with the Ravens?

He says it’s precisely because he believes in the importance of human connection. If he can help players navigate the treacherous paths he has walked, can help Minter forge them into a potent collective, all while working in a place that means the world to him and his family, well, maybe that’s deeper than one man’s ambition.

“You want to be a head coach; you want all these things,” Weaver said after a recent practice, leaning on a chair to take stress off his creaky knees and hips. “But I come back to, ‘Why do you do this?’ You don’t do it for a job title; you do it for service. … There was really no other place I wanted to do it. Did I have to set some ego aside? Sure, but it’s something I don’t have a problem doing, particularly for the people I work for.”

Weaver traces his urge to connect to growing up with parents who met in the U.S. Army. His father, Ralph, was drill sergeant to his mother, Melanie, when she moved from Samoa to serve at Fort Dix, New Jersey. (She once told ESPN she initially thought her future husband a “nasty son of a bitch.”)

Whatever innate shyness Weaver felt as a child, he had to make new friends every time his father’s career took the family to a different state — New Jersey, Texas, Hawaii.

“You have to be able to adapt and talk to people,” he said. “Those places couldn’t be more different. So those experiences made me who I am. Regardless of background, ethnicity, I’m going to talk to you. I’m going to try to build a connection.”

By the time they settled in Saratoga Springs, New York, Weaver, a promising enough athlete that Notre Dame came calling, was a pro at forging relationships.

“I think so,” he said when asked if peers then would have described him the same way people do now. “I hung out with everybody, talked to everybody, wasn’t cliquish. I was always a good athlete, so with that comes a certain amount of popularity, but I tried never to carry myself in that manner.”

He went on to a standout career for the Fighting Irish, and the Ravens drafted him in the second round in 2002, 28 slots after they picked a safety named Ed Reed.

Over four seasons as a starter in Baltimore, Weaver got an up-close view of what made some of the greatest defenders in NFL history — Reed, Ray Lewis, Terrell Suggs — tick. He also fell under the sway of Rex Ryan, a coach possessed of rare genius at connecting with his guys.

“Rex is the guy,” Weaver said. “In terms of my approach, he was the biggest influence, because up until I had Rex — football coaches are all very smart, very disciplined, almost militaristic in their approach, where Rex was the one who made coming to work actually enjoyable. You worked hard, you cared, you sacrificed, but he had a way of teaching and interacting with you where you didn’t ever dread coming to work, regardless of the outcome of the game.”

He never forgot that. He knows from his own experience the inherent stresses of an economically cutthroat, physically brutal and fleeting profession. Ryan made the practice field feel like a “sanctuary” from all of it.

“I try my very best to re-create that every day,” Weaver said. “When you ask grown men to routinely run into other grown men for a living, there’s more of a willingness to do that when you genuinely care for the people you work with.”

Though Ryan and fellow Ravens defensive assistant Mike Pettine told him he had a future in their profession, most of what he observed about coaches told him he didn’t want to be one — some obsessed football ghoul, chained to an office in the team facility at all hours of the day and night.

Wasn’t he too well adjusted for that?

But he was only 28 at the end of his seventh and final NFL season with the Texans. Though he’d made good money, he had to do something.

“It’s in our blood,” he said of football. “I still had a tremendous amount of passion for it, knew l wanted to be around it in some capacity.”

He didn’t want to parachute straight into an NFL job; he always sensed that coaches had more respect for former players who paid their dues. So he began as a graduate assistant at Florida (then-Gators coach Urban Meyer had helped recruit him to Notre Dame), then a linebackers coach at North Texas, before leaping into a string of roles on Ryan and Pettine’s staffs. He landed his first coordinator job with the Texans in 2020 and, after a rough season there, returned to Baltimore to coach John Harbaugh’s defensive line.

Ravens players and coaches say the quiet part out loud when it comes to Weaver’s future. They know he yearns to become the man at the front of the room, a head coach in a league with an underwhelming track record of putting Black men in positions of ultimate power. He just feels like someone who belongs up there, asking players to buy into his mission — Meyer taught him to practice by reading Scripture in front of his church congregation — and serving as a team’s chief voice to its fanbase.

“I want for him the same thing that he wants,” Minter said. “I want to help him be in position to be a head coach. Because he’d be great.”

Of course, Weaver has been hearing for years that he’s a future head coach, and it hasn’t come to pass, even though he’s one of the few people on Earth who knows what it’s like to interview for one of the most coveted jobs in sports. (“It’s really not X’s and O’s-based; it’s more culture,” he said. “There’s a lot of psychological evaluation throughout.”) He tries to be philosophical about whether it will happen for him, noting that, one way or another, he’s probably closer to the end of his football life than the beginning.

“You never know what these owners are looking for,” Weaver said. “So you just have to be who you are. I have a plan where, if I am ever blessed to get that opportunity, I’m convicted in it. I can help an organization get to where they want to get to. But, if that never happens, I will walk away with my head held high.”

The Ravens job was one of those he did not get. After the team announced Minter would succeed Harbaugh, the first feeler about Weaver joining a revamped staff came from general manager Eric DeCosta, who’d led the search.

“I think they were probably trying to feel me out, to see if there was any animosity I had from not getting the job,” Weaver recalled. “Which I didn’t. To be able to come back here as a coordinator, it certainly wasn’t something I anticipated happening. But, as soon as I got the call from both Eric and Jess, it was a no-brainer.”

He was moved when he asked his boys, AJ and Justus, where they wanted to go and both said Baltimore. AJ had coped with debilitating anxiety the last time the family lived here (Weaver’s wife, Kristin, wrote a book about it, “A Family’s Playbook for Coping With Anxiety”). When he wanted to come back and show his former classmates at McDonogh School how much he’d grown, that confirmed to Weaver the move was right.

So he’s back in his recurring NFL home, feeling his way into a role — defensive coordinator who’s not the principal architect of the defense — that’s not unfamiliar in the NFL but is unfamiliar to him and the Ravens.

“It has given me [the freedom] to just step back,” he said in July. “It takes a little bit of mental strain off me. So I can truly do everything I can to build connection with the players and make sure that they are building connection as well. It allows me to take more of a 30,000-foot view on it all, rather than being so entrenched constantly with X’s and O’s — not that I am not, but there is a difference when you have to be out here locked in and calling everything.”

Veteran players have been encouraging.

“I think it is a beautiful dynamic, and it is a beautiful situation,” said middle linebacker Roquan Smith, who will call the defense on the field. “Knowing ‘Weave’ from in the past — I think he is a tremendous person first and foremost. I think he is a tremendous coach as well. Just having him here, and then obviously Jesse’s track record speaks for itself. I think, when you tie two brilliant minds like that together, it just brings out the best in everyone, because two great minds are a lot better than one.”

But those are abstract words explaining why players and fellow coaches like having Weaver in the building.

There is a more pointed question: If he’s not designing the game plan during the week and calling the formations on game day, what will he do?

Minter is a film nerd’s dream. Already, social media brims with posts gushing about his blitz disguises and clever deployment of defensive backs.

As such, Weaver knows, if the Ravens’ defense returns to greatness, he won’t get the lion’s share of the credit.

He doesn’t care.

“The only thing I’m unsure of, only because we haven’t done it yet, is actual game-day operation,” he said. “Where I can assist and where I can help when I’m a non-play-caller. Everything else, we’ll be fine, because I’m going to do everything I’ve done to this point except call it. I think it’s going to be so cool just to bounce ideas off one another. I’m a [defensive] front guy by trade. He’s a back-end guy by trade. To me, it’s a beautiful marriage.”

Minter agreed the partnership is working as both men envisioned. “He’s got a great sense of what the room needs,” he said, noting Weaver is usually the one to deliver a big-picture message each day. “He’s been in their shoes. To have somebody in that role who can really run the defense day to day and knows what those guys need, man, he allows me to take time with other things.”

Players are still acclimating to the dynamic after years of watching Harbaugh defer to his coordinators in game planning.

“That’s new,” said cornerback Marlon Humphrey, the longest-standing member of the defense. “I think ‘Harbs’ obviously sat in meetings, but Jesse will just get up there and run the whole meeting, which is very — it’s really cool. Everyone’s on the same page, so that’s good, as well. But that’s definitely different.”

Humphrey compared it to the interplay he observed between head coach Nick Saban and defensive coordinator Kirby Smart at Alabama. (Smart soon departed to coach Georgia, where he became one of Saban’s top rivals.)

On the practice field, you’re more likely to see Weaver drape an arm around rehabbing defensive tackle Nnamdi Madubuike, offering soft words of encouragement, than you are to hear him barking at a rookie.

“I consider myself a teacher,” he said. “Sometimes, it can be the smallest of things said that can help a guy elevate his game. Or sometimes I’m just talking to them to try to build connection, so they can trust that I have their best interests in mind. At this point in my life, that’s what it is. I don’t need any more money. I never wanted fame. I’m in service mode. I want to give to these players and give to my kids and my family and retire somewhere in anonymity. ”

Here’s where it’s important to note, for all the talk of complicated roles and potential future jobs, Weaver has already achieved much of what he hoped to in coaching. It goes back to the Rex Ryan standard: Has he created environments where players want to work?

When Campbell, one of the most venerated players of his generation, a Walter Payton Man of the Year, called Weaver his favorite coach, it was the purest validation.

Campbell listed the reasons after a recent practice: runs a tight meeting, keeps everyone homed in on a clear message, holds players accountable without being cruel, knows the game like a true junkie. But you could say the same of many high-level coaches. It’s the personal quality that sets Weaver apart.

“He has this mentality where he just wants to help everybody,” Campbell said. “He’s mastered the balance of ‘let me critique you but let’s make football fun.’ That’s what it’s supposed to be, a children’s game that we just happen to play for a living.”

That could have been Weaver talking about Ryan 20 years ago.

“I can’t even put into words what that means to me,” Weaver said. “He’s had a bunch of incredible coaches, but it means more to me because of who he is and the expectations he has of a coach. So, for him to say that, it brings emotion. I wish I could tell you how it makes me feel.”