ExtremeRavens Posted yesterday at 08:29 PM Posted yesterday at 08:29 PM In spring 2002, the Ravens used a second-round draft pick on a defensive end from Notre Dame. As Anthony Weaver recalled, he showed up to training camp his rookie year and was handed a team-issued T-shirt with a prominent logo and forthright message. Better to be feared than loved. Weaver joined the Ravens two seasons removed from the organization’s first Super Bowl. Defense defined those turn-of-the-century teams. Two decades later, from 2021 to 2023, Weaver returned to Baltimore to help construct another period of stellar defenses as a defensive line coach. So when contemporary players spent the past two seasons waxing about a return to playing like those “feared” Ravens defenses, Weaver, the team’s new defensive coordinator, knows what that can and should look like. “It looks like a pack of wolves,” he said. “Like we have 13 guys out there.” In trying to articulate his defense, which will be an extension of first-year coach Jesse Minter’s vision, considering that Minter will call the plays, Weaver’s mind zipped back nearly a quarter-century to that T-shirt he got as a rookie. That’s a major reason Minter hired him. “He knows what it means to be a Raven,” Minter said. “That was a huge piece of it. But most importantly — more so than his experience here, more so than his experience in Miami, or wherever … I don’t think there’s anybody that will get more out of our guys than him.” That’s the quintessential task for those overseeing this Ravens defense. Can they rediscover what was once among the best units in football? The Ravens finished 2025 ranked 24th in the NFL, which was only the third time in 25 years it finished the year in the bottom half of the league. Can Weaver pull them up by their bootstraps? He was asked pointedly about Baltimore’s troubling pass rush, which ranked 31st in sack percentage, and any conclusions he’s drawn from rehashing film of an inconsistent secondary that allowed more explosive plays than half the league. Weaver smiled at the two-parter and bowed his head. “We certainly have rushers, right?” Weaver said. Without All-Pro Nnamdi Madubuike up front, Weaver said, the Ravens struggled to get hands on the quarterback. That’s a fair explanation, but also an acknowledgment that the group never consistently recovered from Madubuike’s neck injury in Week 2. The next name out of Weaver’s mouth, thinking about players who can get into the backfield, was All-Pro safety Kyle Hamilton — another indictment on last year’s shortcomings. A follow-up: Does that mean the Ravens could use their No. 14 draft pick on a defensive lineman? “You’ll have to watch the draft and find out,” Minter laughed. Weaver chimed in, “That’s above my pay grade.” General manager Eric DeCosta will have the final say on personnel. However, it will be up to those two to maximize the roster. Minter’s game planning helped turn around the Chargers’ defense from worst in the NFL in 2024 to among the league’s elite in 2025. In Baltimore, he won’t be so hands-on inside that meeting room, so he’s leaning on Weaver. They’ve run similar schemes at previous stops and share foundational priorities of relationship building. Although they didn’t overlap, both have previous coaching experience in Baltimore. Both know what it means to be a Raven. So in Minter’s eyes, both are equipped to lead the “rebrand” and “new age” of that time-honored slogan. In 2024, former Ravens coach John Harbaugh hired Zach Orr as his defensive coordinator over Weaver. So Weaver took a job with the Dolphins to “show I can lead a defense again as a coordinator.” Weaver elicited uneven results in Miami. In 2024, the Dolphins finished inside the top 10 in both yards and points allowed. They regressed as a unit this past season amid what was a fraught year. Still, Weaver was a respected candidate during this whirlwind coaching cycle. He interviewed for half of the league’s 10 head coaching vacancies. One of them was the Ravens. He flew to Baltimore for a second-round, in-person meeting. All five passed over Weaver in a year the NFL went without hiring a Black head coach. Not receiving that call was disappointing, Weaver admitted. But a homecoming is “hardly a consolation prize,” he said. When Weaver realized he wouldn’t be an NFL head coach this fall, he said he took a step back to recalibrate. He thought about the idea of leaving sunny Miami for a Super Bowl contender. He thought about how, in Week 14 of this past season, the Ravens brought back players from their 2000 Super Bowl-winning team to celebrate the 25th anniversary. “I want that,” he said. “I want to be a part of that.” View this post on Instagram And Weaver’s ultimate goal, he said, is to help the players reach their full potential. “I don’t need to be a head coach to do that. I can certainly do that from this seat,” he explained. The job in question, being back with the team that drafted him and an organization he has familiarity with, helped too. In his mind, being the defensive coordinator for the Ravens is like being the face of defensive coordinators in the NFL. “Like, you’re the dude,” he said. That perception is a credit to the kind of defenses Weaver played for and later coached in Baltimore. Now, for a talented defense that lost its way, Weaver is in charge of making sure they’re feared, not loved. Have a news tip? Contact Sam Cohn at scohn@baltsun.com, 410-332-6200 and x.com/samdcohn.x.com. Sam appears as a host on The Sun’s “Early Birds” podcast. View the full article Quote
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