Declan Doyle never stopped learning. Now he’s the Ravens’ hot-shot offensive coordinator.

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Early in his coaching career, Declan Doyle had a problem. He didn’t know a lot about football, and he didn’t have a lot of money. Bill Walsh’s “Finding the Winning Edge” was considered a coaching bible. It also cost an ungodly amount for a lowly Iowa student assistant.

So Doyle, in the early days of a decade-long search for football wisdom, went looking online. He found a free downloadable version of Walsh’s 550-page book. But to read it, he had to zoom in on every page, as if trying to make out a hidden road on an ancient map.

“Very rarely does somebody at the top of your profession kind of write a handbook on exactly how they do it,” Doyle said. “I think there’s a lot of things that I admire about his level of detail, his attention to what he felt was important.”

The book showed Doyle where he could go in football. Here were Walsh’s steps to the mountaintop of the NFL, where he’d won three Super Bowl titles as the San Francisco 49ers’ coach. And here were the insights of a man whose ideas had shaped the sport. Doyle was eager to absorb it all, the lessons from icons he’d never met and the lessons from offensive gurus he would come to study under.

Now 30, Doyle has become the Next Big Thing in the NFL, the league’s youngest offensive coordinator. In his play-calling debut Sunday, the Ravens thrashed the Indianapolis Colts for 506 yards and 41 points. Quarterback Lamar Jackson, wide receiver Zay Flowers and running back Derrick Henry became the first trio in franchise history to post 300 yards passing, 150 yards receiving and 100 yards rushing in the same game — and Doyle was almost as big a star.

“‘Dec’ was dialing it up,” Jackson said after the win.

Doyle has arrived here, as one of the NFL’s great early-season curiosities, because he realized long ago there is always further to go and more to learn. Doyle is a striver and a seeker, a teacher and a vessel, a pragmatist aware of his horizons and desperate to look beyond them.

From Iowa to New Orleans to Denver to Chicago to Baltimore, Doyle has followed what Bears head coach Ben Johnson said is “his calling.” This is what he always wanted to do. This is also what few his age have ever done. Doyle has packed a career’s worth of lessons into his past decade, according to interviews with over a dozen friends and colleagues.

“He’s prepared for the role in a way that a lot of people don’t,” said Nick DiMarco, a close friend of Doyle’s and the assistant athletic director for peak performance at Elon College. “And I think he’s always just thought that way. He knew what his end goal was, and he was very strategic in the way he went about learning and preparing for that role.”

Learning the ropes

The first playbook Doyle ever made was Iowa’s.

He’d joined the Hawkeyes football team’s staff as a student assistant in 2016, pivoting from baseball after two seasons at Iowa Western Community College. Teaching was in Doyle’s blood; his father, Chris, was a legendary strength and conditioning coach at Iowa, and his mother, Tia, was a math professor.

Doyle had played quarterback and safety through his sophomore year of high school before pursuing baseball full time. Coaching drew him back to football. Doyle wanted to impact people’s lives. He wanted to do it at a high level. There was no “Plan B,” he said last year.

“Our dad always said that he was in the life-changing business,” said younger brother Dillon, a defensive quality control coach for the Colts. “And I think we really consider ourselves in that business as well.”

“When he makes the decision at, like, 18, 19 years old, leaves baseball and says, ‘Hey, I’m going to try to coach. I’m going to try to do it at the highest level’ — that’s how we were raised,” said his youngest brother, Donovan, a scouting strategy coordinator for the New York Jets. “Hey, if I’m going to try to do something, what’s the point in trying to do this and not being the best that I can at it?”

At Iowa, Declan started at the lowest level, making just $7,000 a year. His early duties included “anything that nobody wanted to do”: diagramming offensive plays and preparing playbooks for Hawkeyes players and coaches.

Iowa’s run game and pass game concepts were “meat and potatoes,” recalled Don Shumpert, who worked there as a graduate assistant in 2016. The opposing defenses each week added the schematic spice: How would the offensive line run-block against a 3-4 defensive front? Where would the quarterback look to attack a “Cover 2” defense on a “mesh” concept? Doyle had to account for it all.

Shumpert worked 100-hour weeks during the season. On a good day, he’d be up at 5 a.m. and home by midnight. But it was in Doyle’s blood, Shumpert said, to outwork people. “He was going to be the first in the office and the last one to leave.”

Passion and ambition were prerequisites for student assistants. In addition to diagramming plays, they reviewed over a dozen installs a week with coaches and ran the scout team. All while keeping up with their classes.

“Really, it’s like getting your Ph.D. in football, because that’s all you’re doing all day,” said Shumpert, a former NFL assistant coach and now an NFL agent.

Doyle’s grunt work endeared him to coaches. When Brian Ferentz, the son of longtime Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz, was named offensive coordinator in 2017, he leaned on Doyle as a time-saver. He trusted Doyle to distill a defense’s tendencies and personnel over an entire season into about a 200-play film package, delivered the day after every Iowa game.

Brian Ferentz knew the value of hardworking, impressionable young assistants. He’d started his coaching career in New England under legendary Patriots coach Bill Belichick, who trained his coaches to think like him. Only later did Ferentz realize how difficult mind melds actually are, “because nobody ever quite sees it like you do.”

Doyle was different. He came to see film the same way Ferentz did and evolved to see it even better, Ferentz said.

“All of a sudden, a 190-play tape could become 100 plays because he was so good at categorizing and conceptualizing chaos,” he said.

Doyle was more than just a film junkie. His work with the Hawkeyes’ scout team was its own test: How do you motivate a team of third- and fourth-stringers to see value in their anonymous work at practice? To feel like they’re doing more than standing in as “blocking dummies,” as Ferentz put it?

Doyle was a natural. He treated scout cards — diagrams of practice plays for Iowa’s scout team to simulate the upcoming opponent — like “his masterpieces,” Dillon recalled. Getting buy-in was tricky; not only was Doyle younger than some scout team members, but he was also classmates with a few. But he won their respect, Ferentz said.

“I’m of the firm belief that you cannot train leaders,” he said. “I just think some guys innately have more ability there. Declan had it from Day 1.”

Making the leap

In 2019, after his third and final season at Iowa, Doyle applied for work with every NFL front office and coaching staff — including New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton’s.

The year before, Doyle had reached out to New Orleans assistant offensive line coach Brendan Nugent, who’d coached at Iowa before Doyle was even in high school. He got permission to shadow Nugent at the team’s offseason practices for two days. He met Payton and four future head coaches — Dan Campbell (Detroit Lions), Aaron Glenn (New York Jets), Dennis Allen (Saints) and Joe Brady (Buffalo Bills) — on his staff.

Doyle, only 22, would soon replace Brady as an offensive assistant. “I got really lucky,” he said.

The long hours continued in New Orleans, where Payton’s deliberate approach kept Doyle working late into the night. As a quality control coach, he had to draw a lot of plays accurately. And he had to decide which defensive structures not to draw. And on only a few hours’ sleep. Doyle never complained, his brother Dillon recalled.

Ravens senior offensive assistant Joe Lombardi, the Saints’ quarterbacks from 2016 to 2020, said Doyle made mistakes but adjusted quickly.

“Whatever he learned, he just needed one rep to learn it,” he said.

In meetings with players, Doyle spoke with conviction in his instructions, Campbell recalled.

“The way that he talked, the information that he gave to the players or ideas he had — he was very mature,” he said.

Doyle’s best lessons came from his coaching mentors. In New Orleans, Doyle said, he worked to prove to Payton “that you didn’t pick the wrong guy,” obsessing over every detail. A deeper perspective on coaching emerged.

Said DiMarco, who’s known Doyle since before his coaching career started at Iowa: “I think he’s always prepared for a role or two above.”

‘Another Ben Johnson’

Doyle reunited with Payton in Denver as the Broncos’ tight ends coach in 2023. Two years later, Johnson hired Doyle, then 28, as the Bears’ non-play-calling offensive coordinator. Only two offensive coordinators this century were younger than Doyle when they were hired, according to the NFL: Kyle Shanahan and Sean McVay. Both were in-house promotions.

Johnson had never worked with Doyle. But Johnson had worked in Detroit under Campbell, who knew Doyle well. John Morton, another former Lions colleague who’d gotten to know Doyle as the Broncos’ offensive pass game coordinator, offered a glowing endorsement as well. He said Doyle was “another Ben Johnson,” one of the NFL’s brightest offensive minds.

“He thinks very much like me,” Johnson said last year. “Extremely detailed. Extremely organized. The age does not matter. He is going to be respected by not only the players but also his fellow coaches as well.”

As Johnson and quarterback Caleb Williams led the Bears last season to their first playoff win in 15 years, turning one of the NFL’s least explosive offenses into one of its most potent, Doyle operated mostly behind the scenes.

Bears tight end Cole Kmet called Doyle’s workload “immense,” saying after the season that he had led the offense’s film study and pregame walk-throughs. Ravens tight end Durham Smythe, who played for Doyle and Johnson in Chicago last year, said last week that Doyle would brief the offense at halftime on “exactly what to expect” from the defense.

In the first half of games last season, the Bears’ offense ranked 19th in overall efficiency, according to FTN. In the second half, it was third.

“When someone’s doing that for you,” Smythe said, “it kind of slows everything down.”

But Smythe sensed Doyle wanted more.

‘Do the right things’

Doyle had already started to imagine what it would feel like to call plays. In his first season in New Orleans, before every game, he’d pace around the field, running through his play sheets in make-believe possessions, confident the setting for his play-calling debut would indeed be grand. The tradition carried over to Broncos games, then Bears games.

In late January, just over a week after Chicago’s season ended, Doyle heard from new Ravens head coach Jesse Minter. He had an opening on his coaching staff.

Doyle was happy in Chicago near his Iowa roots; his wife, Erin, had given birth to twins in 2025. Doyle had already withdrawn his name from the Philadelphia Eagles’ offensive coordinator search. But Minter was offering a play-calling role on a team with a two-time NFL Most Valuable Player at quarterback and Super Bowl aspirations. Doyle couldn’t say no.

“The thing that stood out to me about him is that he’s a connector, he’s a collaborator and he’s creative,” Minter said in February. “He’s got a great vision for what our offense should look like.”

Doyle’s work started with his quarterback. He and Minter traveled to South Florida to meet with Jackson. He worked with quarterbacks coach Israel Woolfork to help Jackson ease into new footwork that better suited the offense. He watched every Jackson play from last year and plenty more from previous seasons, assessing what would be foundational to his 2026 playbook and what was disposable.

“You’ve got to be on the same page, because at the end of the day, I’m the one calling the play, and yet he’s the one who’s going to go execute it,” Doyle said. “And I never get to go out there and help him.”

As Doyle rebuilt the Ravens’ offense, his personality came into focus around the team facility. He was more than just a “human computer,” as defensive coordinator Anthony Weaver called him in June.

But there was an internal logic to Doyle’s professional approach. Lombardi joked that Doyle is free of vices, including alcohol. Lombardi recalled Doyle learning at a Saints team dinner that Bananas Foster was made with rum — after he’d cleaned his plate.

“It burns off [in the pan], Declan,” the Saints coaches ribbed him. “Don’t worry.”

Routines and order matter to Doyle. At practice, Doyle typically wears a black, team-issued long-sleeve shirt, black pants and white sneakers. He’s exercised every day for eight straight years. He listens to audiobooks during those workouts and lets his mind wander, his form of meditation.

“Things compound over time when you do the right things,” DiMarco said of Doyle’s approach to life.

Smythe said Doyle could have a photographic memory. He remembers long-ago plays and conversations, quotes from Judd Apatow films and other 2000s comedies, and the lyrics to Drake’s 2011 song “Shot for Me,” which he performed at a team dinner last month in Minnesota.

If this Ravens offense continues to sing, Doyle could set himself up for higher aspirations. Payton said Doyle “absolutely” has head coaching potential — “and that will be quicker than Baltimore wants.” But for now Doyle is where he wants to be, doing what he believes he was born to do.

After Sunday’s win in Indianapolis, Doyle embraced Jackson in the Ravens’ locker room. Doyle told Jackson how much fun it was calling plays for him.

“It’s just the beginning, Coach,” Jackson said.

“It is,” Doyle said. “Good job, buddy.”