Tonight’s National Football League (NFL) opener, featuring the Houston Texans battling the 2020 Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs, will be an extra special one for the City of Saratoga Springs. Saratogian Anthony Weaver, who graduated from Saratoga Springs High School and starred for the Blue Streaks football team while a student-athlete here, will be making his debut as the Texans’ defensive coordinator, a position he landed in the offseason.
Weaver will have his work cut out for him tonight (September 10), with the Chiefs’ explosive offense, led by star quarterback (and 2018 MVP) Patrick Mahomes, sure to make his first game interesting. In a press conference on September 6, Weaver joked, “I was hoping with all the COVID protocols that maybe they’d give us an extra player to play with on defense, but we couldn’t talk the league into that.” Because of the pandemic, Weaver really had no on-field dry run; all preseason games were canceled leading up to tonight. He went on to say that Kansas City’s offense “presents a tremendous challenge, and we’re just going to do our best to try to keep them in front of us and limit the explosive plays that they feed off of every time they touch the ball.”
In a twist of fate, Weaver, who was drafted by the Baltimore Ravens in 2002 as a defensive lineman, will be facing the Ravens in his second game as defensive coordinator on September 20.
After Weaver graduated from Saratoga, he went on to play at the University of Notre Dame, where he made the all-freshman first team his first season and was named one of four team captains in 2001. Following college, Weaver was drafted by the Ravens in ’02, playing there for three years, before finishing out his career as a member of the Houston Texans in 208.
He was the Texans’ defensive line coach before his most recent promotion, and also did stints with the defensive coaching staffs of the New York Jets and Buffalo Bills.
