It was early 2019, not long after Lamar Jackson finished his rookie season, when 22-year-old Declan Doyle interviewed for his first NFL job – offensive assistant for the New Orleans Saints.
Doyle's flight out of New Orleans was delayed, so he was sent to Dallas. That flight was cancelled, so he had to stay overnight in a hotel. He didn't have any other clothes but the suit he wore to the interview and didn't have much money to fix the problem because he only made $7,000 a year as a student assistant at the University of Iowa.
It didn't seem like Doyle cared much about the suboptimal circumstances.
"I was the happiest dude in the world. Couldn't tell me anything," Doyle recalls.
Doyle nailed the interview. The next morning, he flew back to Iowa and went straight back into work. He was eating lunch when Sean Payton, then the head coach of the Saints, called and told him he got the job.
"I was like, 'Holy sh**, my life is …" Doyle said, pausing to swallow his emotions. "That's a hard moment to describe, how much that means to you in that moment. It changed my entire life, it changed the trajectory of everything. I was 22 and I was going to work in the NFL. I was like, this is as good as it gets."
Just eight years later, Doyle is the offensive coordinator of the Baltimore Ravens. Hired at 29 years old (now 30), he's still the NFL's youngest offensive coordinator, same as last year when he held the same title but different duties with the Chicago Bears. This time, he's the play-caller, too.
But while Doyle is the youngest, he isn't young. This is the job Doyle has been preparing for since well before he took off for that interview with the Saints.
"I totally get the shock value of it," Doyle said of his age, "because people compare it to whatever their experience is with 30-year-olds. I've approached this as my profession for 11 years. There's a lot of nights that you were in bed that I was working."
The Kid Who Drew Plays
Doyle was in second grade when his teacher gave him a writing assignment. Doyle asked if he could write a play.
It wasn't until the teacher came back and discovered the Xs and Os of offensive football plays scribbled on Doyle's paper that she realized he didn't mean a drama.
Growing up the son of Chris Doyle, the longtime strength and conditioning coach of the Iowa Hawkeyes from 1999-2020, Declan was around football his entire childhood. He played the "Madden" video games just like many other kids and spent most of his days playing sports with his two younger brothers.
But Doyle's best sport was baseball. That's what he played in college, choosing the junior college route over some small school offers. He was a first baseman and team captain for two seasons at Iowa Western Community College, but when he again didn't get the big-school offers he hoped for, Doyle pivoted.
He transferred to Iowa, where his father worked, and took a job as a student assistant for the football team in 2016. After all, his dad was a coach, his mom was a teacher, and he always wanted to help young people. Coaching made sense.
"I didn't know how much I would like football," Doyle said. "I didn't honestly know very much. I didn't know how little I knew. So I basically went all-in."
His first classroom was with Iowa's tight ends, which had one of the best tight ends of this era (George Kittle) and two future NFL first-round picks (T.J. Hockenson and Noah Fant). Not bad company to grow with.
Doyle worked about 100 hours a week, all while still taking a full course load. He was paid for just 20 hours at $7.50 an hour. He lived with a high school friend a block away from the football facility so he could walk to work every day.
Doyle took on more duties the following year, including drawing all the offensive runs and passes. That means sketching every single play that could be used against the opponent's most common alignments to see where there could be problems. It's a tedious, yet critical job not usually given to a student assistant.
"For the three years I was at Iowa, there was nobody that was in the building more than I was," Doyle said. "I didn't go out on weekends, I didn't do anything. I was just at the facility trying to learn as best I could."
What he found was that the well of football knowledge is infinitely deep, and he had an insatiable desire to keep digging.
"I can study it my whole life and never get to the bottom of it — that was super intriguing to me," Doyle said. "There are people that are good at math, there are people that are good at other things. You kind of get into this flow state when you're in that thing that you like that comes natural to you. This is that for me."
"I can study it my whole life and never get to the bottom of it — that was super intriguing to me." Declan Doyle
Scheming at the Highest Level
After his first two years as a student assistant at Iowa, Doyle knew he had only one year left until graduation and needed to plan for his next step.
He saw two options: become a position coach at smaller college, where he would get the experience of molding a room of players, or get his PhD in Xs and Os.
"What I wanted to do was go coach at the highest level and be around scheme at the highest level," Doyle said. "So I wanted to get to the NFL. I knew that was pretty unlikely because I was 21 years old."
So, during the 2017 offseason, Doyle planned some road trips. He paid his own way to visit the Kansas City Chiefs, Houston Texans, and Saints during their organized team activities, to watch practice and try to make an impression on their coaches – Andy Reid, Bill O'Brien, and Payton, respectively.
Doyle studied each of their offenses so he would be prepared to ask good questions about how what they were doing could be incorporated into Iowa's scheme, all while impressing them with his knowledge.
After his final year at Iowa, he sent work samples and projects he had done at Iowa to all 32 NFL head coaches and general managers, asking for work. He felt he had made such a strong impression on coaches the previous summer that, after he graduated college, moved into his parents' basement and waited.
It was during that break that he met his wife, Erin. They only dated for a month before nearly every waking hour was devoted to football. Love had to move fast, too.
When Doyle learned about an opening with the Saints, he called and asked to throw his hat in the ring. They had about 50 candidates and he figured he had to be among the least qualified, at least on paper. Doyle didn't make the original cutdown to two, but the Saints changed their mind and brought him in anyway.
Doyle felt on top of the world when Payton gave him the job, but it wasn't glamorous. Doyle's second day on the job was at the NFL Combine, where he added scouting assistant grunt work, such as securing spots at the weigh-ins, to his duties. The Combine is a social event. Besides those tasks, Doyle spent the entire event in his hotel room trying to learn the playbook.
He had to ready to contribute to an offense led by Payton and future Hall-of-Fame quarterback Drew Brees, who was entering his 19th and second-to-last season.
"When you go in and start game-planning with those guys, the problems they're solving are so far beyond where you're at as a first-year staffer," Doyle said. "They've had collective discussion on their offense, of what they believe, for 14 years."
In addition to learning the scheme, Doyle watched how Payton commanded a room with his presence. Doyle watched how that presence carried over into Payton's aggressive play-calling. Doyle now talks about "hunting" explosive plays as a play-caller, but he was still years away from doing so when he started taking notes from Payton.
Payton is well known for being extremely detailed. Even the Broncos lapel pin he wore for his 2023 introductory press conference in Denver was tilted a bit up, he said, to project the trajectory the organization was on. Everything mattered, and there was no doubt that as Doyle entered his first NFL job at the bottom of the ladder, it was going to be a grind.
"That first year in the NFL was the hardest year that I've had professionally," he said.
The Florida Gene
For all four years in New Orleans, Doyle shared an office with fellow offensive assistant D.J. Williams, who is now the quarterbacks coach of the Washington Commanders.
Williams is the son of Super Bowl-winning quarterback Doug Williams and was a college quarterback at Grambling State. This was his first foray into coaching, and he quickly found out how much he had to learn.
"I attribute a lot of what I know about coaching to Declan," Williams said. "He was four years at Iowa, where it's like a coaching factory. So he came in with a pro approach. Everybody sees how young he is by age, but talking to him, he's like a 40-year-old man. I don't mean that in a bad way — I just mean maturity-wise, he has so much wisdom."
They joked that their office was where all the problems rolled in. They had to find the answers. Doyle was in charge of drawing the run game, where he once again searched for holes in defenses, writing out the offensive call sheet, coaching both sides of the ball on scout team, and much more. Williams was in charge of drawing the passing game.
"You could see his kid-like mentality — and when I say that, I mean just wanting to learn every single day," Williams said. "That was the thing I saw — a consistent learner, always hungry for information, always hungry to learn."
The morning after his first NFL game, a 2019 Monday Night Football "banger," as he called it, when the Saints came back to win against the Texans, Doyle was back in the office early the next morning to break down 1,100 clips for data entry.
On Payton's staff, sleep was not an employee benefit. The way he game-planned, Doyle left the Saints headquarters between 2 and 3 a.m. on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and 1-2 a.m. on Thursdays. He was back in at 5:30 a.m. each morning.
"By the time you would get to Friday, I was like a dead person," Doyle said.
Doyle and Williams used to call it "Fake Juice Friday" because they still had to bring the energy to coach both sides of the ball on scout team for practice. When Doyle got home, he would immediately go to bed at 4 p.m. and sleep through the night.
"You go through the full season like that, it changes the way your brain works," Doyle said. "It teaches you, I called it, the Florida Gene."
Doyle's quarterback now, Lamar Jackson, is Florida through-and-through. The "Florida Gene" means that at any time, from anywhere in the country, if someone tells you to drive to Florida, you'll do it – no matter how bleary-eyed you may already be.
"The best QCs [quality control coaches] in the world have the Florida Gene," Doyle said. "Go get the keys. You're driving to Florida. That is the difference, to me, between a guy that can make it and a guy that can't."
The term is used by Doyle and Logan Kilgore, the current quarterbacks coach of the Denver Broncos who worked with Doyle for two years (2023-2024) after Doyle followed Payton to Denver to be his tight ends coach. Kilgore was in Doyle's shoes, getting his NFL start as an offensive assistant. It's still a running joke between the two of them. Doyle will text sometimes to ask how he's doing and Kilgore will respond, "I'm just north of Jacksonville."
"This is my 11th year coaching. For seven of those years, I was either a student assistant or a QC [quality control coach]," Doyle said. "So you're the lowest guy, you're doing a ton of work. Those are the formative years that nobody knows your name, nobody knows who you are, no one would care. But you're doing just as much work as anybody – maybe more in a lot of cases."
After Payton stepped down as Saints head coach and took a gap year, Doyle interviewed with Ben Johnson to be the Detroit Lions' tight ends coach. Johnson was up-and-coming coach who Dan Campbell, whom Doyle worked with in the tight ends room in New Orleans, had just promoted to be the Lions' offensive coordinator.
Doyle didn't get the job, but Johnson didn't forget him. While many offensive coordinators, such as Payton, come from quarterback coaching backgrounds, Johnson and Doyle both jumped from tight ends coach to coordinator, which gave them a broader offensive understanding of the run game, blocking, and passing game.
John Morton was the offensive coordinator in Denver when Doyle spent two years there as a tight ends coach. He saw how Doyle studied every aspect of the game, how he was a "grinder."
When Johnson became the Bears' head coach in January 2025, he called Morton, who worked with Johnson for one year in Detroit and asked if Doyle was ready to be an offensive coordinator.
"Ben, he's you. He's just 10 years younger than you," Morton told Johnson. "You guys are going to be perfect together."
“Ben, he’s you. He’s just 10 years younger than you, You guys are going to be perfect together.” John Morton to Ben Johnson
The Older Brother He Never Had
Doyle has two younger brothers, both also already working in the NFL.
The middle brother, Donovan, is a scouting strategy coordinator with the New York Jets. The youngest, Dillon, is in his first year as a defensive quality control coach with the Indianapolis Colts. He's probably racking his brain trying to figure out what Declan's offense will bring to Indianapolis on Sept. 13.
In Chicago, Declan gained an older brother named Ben.
"He is brilliant, he's detailed. He made me view football in a completely different lens – from the spacing of the field, the spacing of the passing game," Declan said of Johnson.
"He taught me more about football in a year than … he's arguably the best coach I've ever been around. He's probably the most influential person that I've been around. In addition to it, my relationship with him is like he was the older brother I never had. I felt like he was the closest thing to myself that I've ever been around in coaching in just how he approaches the game, how he felt about offense, his logic."
Doyle was accustomed to working the most hours. In Chicago, Johnson was almost always the first person in the building, rolling in daily at 4:50 a.m.
And the way Johnson coached, with such attention to meeting a standard through emphasis on the details, reminded Doyle of the Iowa program he great up around, where they routinely brought in two- and three-star players who performed like five-stars.
"I was like, OK, we leave no stone unturned, we work really hard, we looked for every single edge, we don't let anything slide, we're really demanding about the standard and we're not going to short-change that. We're going to live up to the standard every day," Doyle said. "Ben embodies that."
In Chicago, Doyle also got a valuable year teaching in front of a full room and was an important voice in making halftime adjustments during games.
Those adjustments helped the Bears turn everything around in one year. They led the league with six fourth-quarter comebacks. They went from last in the league in offensive yards in 2024 to sixth in 2025. Caleb Williams played like the first-overall pick he was, and Chicago posted its best record since 2018 en route to an appearance in the Divisional Round.
Doyle didn't want to leave. He and his wife, Erin, became parents to twin babies, Maverick and Bentley, in Chicago. They didn't go on a vacation, didn't do anything for a calendar year. They were embedded in the Windy City.
But when the winds of change blew through Baltimore, there was a unique opportunity for Doyle. He had other teams interested in his services, but the Ravens were special.
"I get a chance to start at the ground level with a two-time MVP quarterback, a really good communicator head coach whom I have a ton of respect for from playing him in Denver, one of the most elite organizations in football, elite ownership, elite front office," Doyle said. "It was like, what are you going to find that's better than this?"
So, after just one year, Doyle left Chicago to launch his own offense and, at long last, call his own plays, which had evolved a little bit since second grade.
And at the NFL Combine, Johnson shared how disappointed he was to lose Doyle, the first branch to grow from Johnson's coaching tree.
"Declan is a phenomenal football coach," Johnson said. "If you didn't know that he was 29 years old, you wouldn't blink an eye. The guy is seasoned beyond his years. This has been his calling."
Path to Mastery
On the top corner of every one of his play-call sheets, Doyle writes "P2M" – path to mastery.
In the book, "Outliers," Malcolm Gladwell explains that 10,000 hours – roughly 20 hours a week for 10 years – of focused effort on something results in mastery. Robert Greene took it further in "Mastery," claiming 20,000 hours unlocks creative mastery.
"I'm somewhere past 10,000, on my way to 20,000," Doyle said. "Creative mastery is when you can start to see the picture in your head and you can start to move pieces."
As soon as he got into the NFL with the Saints in 2019, Doyle started to consistently practice being an offensive play-caller. Saturdays in the NFL are pretty chill, so for the past seven years, Doyle has spent that free time building out his own call sheet, scripting his openers, ranking his third-down calls, etc.
Then, before every game, Doyle walks the field three times, playing out three drives in his head – moving the pieces.
Zach Grossi, who worked with Doyle for his two seasons in Denver, used to tell Doyle that his first game calling plays wouldn't be against some mid-tier FCS school. It would be against an NFL defense, perhaps like the blitzing one he faced last week in Minnesota.
"I knew that I wanted to be a play caller at some point in time," Doyle said. "And I knew I wasn't going to get a lot of reps at it before I got the opportunity to do it if I was going to be in the NFL. So, I felt like very early on I needed to try to steal reps as best I could and think like a play-caller."
Essentially, Doyle built habits. He learned that from the book "Atomic Habits" by James Clear, which teaches that if you want to have a different life, build different habits, do them every day, and you'll become a different person. If you're wondering how Doyle finds so much time to read, it's because he listens to audio books when he exercises and he has exercised every day for eight straight years.
Habits.
"That's how I got here," Doyle said. "It's just a collection of things that I do every day."
Doyle's trying to ingrain those habits in his players. From the start, Ravens players have noticed a difference in the attention paid to details. Whether it be the depth of routes, their footwork (Doyle and Quarterbacks Coach Israel Woolfork notably switched Jackson from a left-footed quarterback to right-footed), or even how they huddle, every detail has seemed to matter.
Jackson laughed when telling reporters that Doyle cussed him out during a training camp practice when he tossed the ball instead of running a naked bootleg. A two-time MVP, Jackson has appreciated the hard coaching.
"The standard you walk by is the standard you accept, and that's a new standard," Doyle said. "I'm not going to hit play [on the film] and you do something that's not up to standard and me not bring it up."
How does he not rub players the wrong way?
"The strongest emotion anybody can feel is love. It's more than fear," Doyle said. "They need to feel like, 'Hey, man, I care about you and I want you to succeed and I want you to accomplish this goal, and that's why I'm telling you that this behavior has to change.'"
It's working. Ravens players have been reciprocating the love all spring and summer.
Jackson called Doyle a "wizard": "The way Declan calls plays and his creativity with his mind — how detailed he is — it's mind-blowing. With the type of coaching that Declan is bringing, the sky's the limit."
Tight end Mark Andrews called Doyle's offense "incredible": "Dec's special, man. His age, being able to be where he's at, it's just really, really special, and it's just an incredible opportunity for all of us to be around him."
Wide receiver Zay Flowers called Doyle a "genius": "He has stuff that I've never seen – plays and routes and stuff to help you get open. … I love it."
Left tackle Ronnie Stanley is entering his 11th season and is the Ravens' longest-tenured player. Doyle is Stanley's fifth offensive coordinator, following Todd Monken, Greg Roman, Marty Mornhinweg, and Marc Trestman. Roman, 54, is the only one under 60 years old.
"I have been very impressed with Declan and his leadership abilities, especially for such a young guy to come in and control a room," Stanley said. "He is very intelligent and he has a great way of conveying information to other people, and I think there is just a sense of wisdom about him that is really going to bode well for us."
Stepping Onto the High Dive
After the Vikings' relentless blitz gave the Ravens troubles in two joint practices last week, Doyle went to every position room at the team hotel during meetings, making sure players knew what they were supposed to do on specific pressure looks.
"Having an offensive coordinator that can really kind of personalize everything that you are doing and really give you a clear objective of what you need to do is awesome," said rookie tight end Josh Cuevas, who had a team-high 46 receiving yards in the Ravens' second preseason game.
Doyle is working harder than ever. He said he tries to leave work at work but realized it's impossible. He wakes up in the wee hours, mind racing.
"My text message thread to myself is just massive — solving the day's problems at 3 in the morning, every day," he said with a chuckle. "I think that's what you sign up for."
You'd never know Doyle missed so much sleep. He doesn't have bags under his eyes. His hair is perfectly combed and beard trimmed. He looks and talks like a 30-year-old. Flowers joked that sometimes, he has to tell Doyle to talk slower. But don't let appearances fool you.
"I'm 30, but this is the eighth year in the NFL of being around high-level football thinking, high-level coaching. I don't feel like I'm young in any way," Doyle said.
"I'm young in the fact that I haven't called a lot of plays, but I don't feel like a young person. I feel like I've lived a lot of life in that amount of time. I've been around a lot of different guys, different types of guys, and I'll be a much better coach 10 years from now than I am right now, just like I'm a lot better right now than I was five years ago."
Less than a month from calling plays in his first regular-season game, Doyle said it feels like he's stepping onto the high dive. He was the "guy behind the guy before," but now it's his offense.
Doyle planned to call one preseason game from the booth and another from the sideline, but he felt so comfortable in the first preseason game calling the shots from upstairs that he remained up there for the second preseason game and will do so in the regular season.
"There are a lot of aspects of that are very different than being the non-play-caller, but I feel very ready to do it," Doyle said.
"Now, it's about going out and doing it at a high level and doing it well and being able to produce. I very much recognize the weight of the position and it's not something I take lightly at all. Every day, I'm hunting to outperform that. I want to have a standard that's much higher than anybody else's standard for me."
Young offensive minds have skyrocketed up the NFL's coaching ranks over the past decade. Sean McVay was hired as the Los Angeles Rams' head coach at 30 years old. There's a reason why Peyton, at the NFL Combine this year, said Doyle will be a head coach "quicker than Baltimore wants."
But as he prepares for his first season in Baltimore, Doyle is saying the same thing he did when he got his first NFL job in New Orleans. This is as good as it gets.
"I could win the lottery, and I would show back up to work tomorrow," he said, "and be like, 'Let's keep going.'"
