How did Ravens coach Jesse Minter end up rapping Eminem for the team? Inside Baltimore’s culture shift, where young play-callers are more than just young

OWINGS MILLS, Md. — Jesse Minter's performance went viral.

But at the Baltimore Ravens' team dinner, he was not the first coach to take the mic. And staff performances were not part of the plan.

The Ravens' dinner, scheduled during their trip to Minnesota for joint practices and a preseason game against the Vikings, featured a standard NFL tradition: rookie players singing before the rest of the team.

Second-round rookie edge rusher Zion Young asked defensive coordinator Anthony Weaver if he could perform another act. Young had already shown his defensive teammates his imitation of Weaver; could Young show his Weaver bit to the whole team?

Weaver agreed, but cautioned Young: Your defensive teammates have already seen this and your offensive teammates won't catch many of your references. Young risked the flop.

"So it was a dud, it was bad," Weaver told Yahoo Sports of the imitation he admitted was "hilarious" the first time around. "I did warn him. I did. I tried to. That's my job as a coach: Try and save you. So I got up there and sang to save him from the ridicule from his teammates.

"I essentially got up there and changed the focus of attention."

As Weaver's rendition of Anthony Hamilton's "Charlene" impressed players, an energetic room continued to call for coaches.

"Double D!" wide receiver Zay Flowers exclaimed into the microphone afterward.

Offensive coordinator Declan Doyle hadn't expected to sing, but the detail-oriented coach considered his cues as he reached the front of the room.

"Similar to how I call plays, I was thinking about like, 'All right, what are the boys going to know?'" Doyle told Yahoo Sports. "You watch rookie performances and they're literally all about enthusiasm. And as long as you don't forget the words, and you're enthusiastic and you have energy, you should be fine."

So Doyle pulled off his rendition of "Shot for Me" by Drake. Then momentum turned toward the Ravens head coach.

Would Minter, a steady-energy personality like Doyle, let loose and sing? The question wasn't what artist he'd choose — Weaver had already correctly guessed Minter's Eminem fandom at a spring uniform reveal event for fans . But would Minter, a rookie head coach, play into a ruse he had the option to avoid?

Minter's 30+ seconds of Eminem's "Lose Yourself" energized the room and soon the internet after highly touted rookie receiver Ja'Kobi Lane shared a clip on Instagram. Players gathered around a table of half-eaten key lime pie and partially drank water glasses, singing along. The moment felt almost natural despite the surprise.

Because after 18 years with John Harbaugh as the Ravens head coach, a new and needed energy shift has arrived. That's by design. It's not a knock on Harbaugh, whose culture is now animating his New York Giants locker room. But sometimes messages lose their edge — as parents and children across time have seen — and disciples are more willing to listen to a new source.

Enter 43-year-old Minter to replace the 63-year-old Harbaugh, and 30-year-old Doyle taking over for 60-year-old Todd Monken (now the Cleveland Browns head coach). A youth movement has arrived in Baltimore. Players noticed even before Minter rapped "Lose Yourself," which he figured would resonate despite its 2002 release given Eminem had "survived the last 10 years on my playlist." And they're well aware after it.

"For him to end it off like that kind of shows that at the end of the day, he's our leader, but at the same time, he's going through everything we're going through and he's willing to do the things that it takes," cornerback Chidobe Awuzie told Yahoo Sports. "Some coaches [would] be like, 'Oh no, I'm too big for that.' But [Minter] got up there, turned us all up, had a great time.

"You have a coach that has that energy, it just reinforces all those things that we're trying to get out of the game."

While Ravens D could look similar, Lamar Jackson and offense are changing

From the Ravens' Jan. 22 hiring of Minter to their early February hiring of Doyle, Baltimore did not simply hire young play-callers for the sake of hiring young play-callers.

Minter arrives in Baltimore after coordinating consecutive top-10 scoring defenses for the Los Angeles Chargers. Doyle earns his second straight promotion from a boss under which he's not previously worked, after coordinating Chicago Bears head coach Ben Johnson's top-10 scoring offense.

Minter and Weaver each return to Baltimore after prior stints coaching there in the last decade, creating a continuity with recent Ravens units that leaned into physicality and aggressiveness. Baltimore maintained its hold on top-10 defenses in terms of scoring and yardage from 2022-2024 before falling to 18th in points allowed and 24th in yardage last season.

With a defensive line that now features edge rusher Trey Hendrickson and Young, and a secondary that continues to be anchored by chess piece Kyle Hamilton, the Ravens' first-team defense created problems for both the Vikings and the Washington Commanders in August joint practices.

Weaver references a film review from their joint practice in Minnesota, the camera angle just behind Vikings quarterback Kyler Murray. The Ravens had dropped eight defenders in coverage on a red-zone play that presented a third-and-5 play, give or take.

"There was no place to go for the ball," Weaver said. "You just felt the pocket with Calais [Campbell] and Trey [Hendrickson] and [Tavius Robinson] out there right on three-man rush. And that's not even all rushers out.

"But when I think about that, that's what you constantly want to see. You just want to see suffocating defense."

A suffocating defense could give an offense undergoing more noticeable shifts room to breathe.

In Lamar Jackson's ninth season, expect more under-center work from the two-time MVP who has not been primarily under center since youth football, he said. Expect Jackson's throwing mechanics to shift from a right-foot-forward motion to a left-foot-forward motion that Shanahan-McVay and West Coast system teams across the league believe is imperative to the timing of the passing game.

"Everything in the dropback passing game times up with that left foot forward," Doyle said. "That took a little bit, not a little discussion, but I wanted to make sure he felt comfortable doing it before we were like, 'Hey, let's just go down that path.' He felt really good about it, and so we started working in the spring, and it's come really natural to him."

Also natural to Jackson, in Doyle's vantage point: taking coaching points.

Doyle insisted on meeting with Jackson before accepting the Ravens' job offer, 30-year-old play caller and 29-year-old quarterback Zooming for an hour in that process to get on the same page. Regular communication has continued. After a series of five plays in practice, Doyle finds Jackson to ask: "What'd you see here? What'd you see here ?" On the Ravens' first off day of training camp, Jackson and Doyle met in Doyle's office for 3 ½ hours to watch film and swap ideas from their past.

"Whatever it is, it's a pass concept, I've seen that pass concept hit so many times that I have a Rolodex of things in my head of how to teach that and coach that," Doyle said. "He's thrown it so many times that he's got a Rolodex. And so we're constantly trying to adjust and fix problems and get on the same page.

"It's just this rabbit hole that you're going down together."

This Ravens staff knows it arrives to a team with a quarterback who's won 76 of 107 career starts, completing 64.8% of his passes for 22,608 yards and 187 touchdowns to 56 interceptions. Jackson's 102.2 career passer rating leads the NFL all-time, per Pro Football Reference. That mark doesn't even factor in the dual-threat Jackson's 6,522 yards and 35 touchdowns rushing in the regular season.

What's the key to coaching a player who's already achieved so much success? Minter and Doyle are eager to scheme Jackson's rare talent arsenal in collaboration with their quarterback while remaining unafraid to coach him hard and ask him to implement new concepts. Jackson saw that firsthand during OTAs when he was supposed to run a bootleg play-action play and instead tossed the ball as if he were assigned a run play. Jackson told reporters afterward that Doyle yelled: "Lamar, what the F are you doing?" The quarterback learned that the coordinator he'd praised for creativity and "mind-blowing" detail was also not afraid to lay down the law.

"I let him know that that was not correct and he responded to that right away because at the end of the day, he's a guy that wants to be coached," Doyle said. "He's very coachable. He wants to get it right. And at the same point in time, you want to make sure that he knows, 'Hey, this is the standard and I don't care who you are.'

"If you're the starting quarterback or you're our fourth guy, you're going to be held to a certain standard."

Ravens on Minter: 'Unapologetically who he is'

Creating expectations from preseason play is a dangerous, and usually foolish, practice in the NFL. Team strategies range on whether to play or sit starters, and how much of a playbook to reveal. Discrepancies skew predictive accuracy.

The Ravens nonetheless leaned into a historical franchise interest in winning preseason games this year.

The result: No defense allowed fewer points per preseason game than the Ravens' 4.3, only the Harbaugh-coached Giants (7.3) joining Baltimore in allowing fewer than 10. And no team came within 5 points of the Ravens' league-best 21.7-point preseason game scoring differential. The Super Bowl-favorite Los Angeles Rams ranked second, beating teams by an average of 14.7 points.

"You really want to play to your identity, and you want to create a play style of how you play in all three phases," Minter told reporters. "What are your standards? What are you accepting as playing for the Ravens? And the thing I am really most proud of is that all the guys out there play the way we want to play."

Baltimore will see whether that win-every-chance mindset translates to the regular season. And the Ravens will receive some degree of cushion as they acclimate.

Because not until Week 8, at the Buffalo Bills, will Baltimore face a team that advanced to the playoffs last season. An early slate beginning with the Indianapolis Colts and New Orleans Saints should give Jackson and Co. a chance to adjust to their new offensive system, while Minter gets his feel for the new personnel against which he's calling plays. The NFL's arc toward parity means some of those missed-playoff teams could be more competitive than their 2025 season suggests, most notably the Ravens' Week 3 opponent: The Ravens will face the Dallas Cowboys in Rio de Janeiro, a long plane ride before a game against a team returning a potent offense and revamped defense.

Still, tougher on-paper games against the Bills, Jacksonville Jaguars, Los Angeles Chargers and Houston Texans won't hit until later in the season.

Players are eager to see what their schemes look like by then, from defenders wondering how Hamilton creeps from the deep backfield closer to the ball, to Baltimore's offensive cast marveling at Jackson seeming to have eyes on the sides of the head as he hits rollout targets that seem to defy the limits of human peripheral vision. All eyes will be on Jackson's health and mobility, too: When asked recently about his career low 5.2 rushing attempts per game last year (Jackson's prior seasons had ranged from 8.2-11.7), he pointed to the slew of injuries that also limited him to 11 full games last year.

And how will the coaching staff navigate the tides of an NFL season? The even-keeled nature of their play-callers encourages the roster, tight end Durham Smythe said. Smythe, who played for the Miami Dolphins and Bears before joining Baltimore, said he's often asked how he likes his head coach and coordinator.

"And I'm always like, 'If you ask me before the season, I love them, but you don't really know a person until the bullets are flying, you lose a game, you lose two games in regular season,'" Smythe told Yahoo Sports. "But I am just very confident in those guys in terms of how this team is going to react when something does go wrong, which you can't always say."

That steady demeanor made Minter and Doyle's Eminem and Drake performances that much more thrilling for players, who didn't expect the rise in energy their coaches delivered in Minnesota.

Weaver watched Minter rap lyric after lyric, noticing how players responded.

"You could just tell the guys are drawn to just his humanity and vulnerability, and the fact that he is who he is and unapologetically who he is," Weaver said. "The guys respect that."