### **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."