Why this Browns job means so much to Todd Monken, and how he has the tears to prove it: Mary Kay Cabot

CLEVELAND, Ohio — New Browns head coach Todd Monken didn’t see the tears coming until they sprang to his eyes, just as he was about to thank all the important people in his life near the end of his opening remarks at his introductory press conference on Tuesday.

“S—,” he said in his raspy voice to a chorus of laughter as he stopped to compose himself and dab at his eyes at the podium. “I told myself I wasn’t gonna cry for God sakes. I want to thank my mom and dad, no longer with us. My brothers Tony and Ted ….”

The tears welled back up and he stopped again to keep them from spilling onto his bright orange tie. Moments later, he jumped back in, determined for a dry finish.

“ …. my college roommates, drove up here to be here today. My father in law, Chuck, my son Travis, proud of the man you’ve become, and his fiancé, Hannah, and my wife Terri, been together 40 years, been married 34. Of course, she would say that’s probably six, because you’re actually married to the game. So, it’s been an unbelievable journey, thank you, I love you.”

After waiting 37 years for his opportunity — and just two days before his 60th birthday — who could blame the sometimes gruff and ever-cussing Monken for getting emotional?

“Wow. Man, am I excited to lead this flagship NFL franchise,” he said at the top of his opening remarks. “It’s been a long time coming, really has been a long journey, and there’s a lot of people as we get down the road here that I’m gonna have to thank, but I’m jacked. It’s really, it’s hard to even put into words.”

Before taking questions, Monken set the bar high for himself in gratitude for the long-awaited opportunity. In addition to family, friends and media assembled in a meeting room at CrossCountry Mortgage Campus, Monken had plenty of his assistants there, including some of the defensive ones awaiting word on the status of departed coordinator Jim Schwartz.

“Dee and Jimmy (Haslam), they cut a check with my name on it,” Monken said. “You know what they expect? A fricking kick a– football team. That’s what they expect. You know what they want? They want to become a winning franchise that our fan base and our region is proud of. That’s all they’ve been about, is how you build a winning franchise that consistently competes for championships. My job is to prove it every single day, and I appreciate that.”

Football is all Monken has ever known. His dad, Bob Monken, was a high school football coach, and the game is in his DNA. His uncles were high school football coaches, and his son, Travis, is an assistant at Purdue. His cousin, Jeff Monken, is head coach at Army.

“I’ve been part of a team since I’ve been five years old – the Purple Pounders of Wheaton, Illinois,” Monken said. “It’s the coolest thing ever to be part of a team, let’s just put it that way, OK?”

A two-year starting quarterback at Knox College, Monken has only ever wanted to coach or play ball.

“Other than my mom making an Evel Knievel outfit or an astronaut, I was a football player every Halloween,” he said. “Everybody else was getting trains, they were getting army men, I was getting football games. My dad, every single little vibrating football game or talking football or rubber band football – every single game I ever got was about football.”

Monken got his start at Grand Valley State as a graduate assistant in 1989, making $5,000 a year. His father-in-law wondered how he’d be able to support his daughter, and Monken jokingly told him that she’d be supporting him. When he became a graduate assistant at Notre Dame in 1991, Chuck started to see that maybe Monken was on to something.

He spent the next 16 years working his way up through the college ranks, at Eastern Michigan, Louisiana Tech, Oklahoma State and Louisiana State University, working almost exclusively on the offensive side of the ball except for one year as defensive backs coach at Eastern Michigan.

Finally, he got the call up to the big leagues, as wide receivers coach for the Jacksonville Jaguars from 2007-10, where receiver Reggie Williams set a club record with 10 touchdown catches in Monken’s first season.

“To me, it’s not until you get into the NFL that you ever process that the opportunity could potentially be there, to be a head coach in the NFL,” Monken said. “Obviously, you have to probably reach the coordinator level to where that becomes a possibility. There have been times before where I’ve been close, and I believe God puts you at the right place at the right time, and that is now.”

Monken went back to Oklahoma State in 2011-12 as offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach, where he tutored Brandon Weeden, the Browns’ 2012 No. 22 overall pick. He then earned his first head coaching stint at Southern Miss, where he got some of those first-time head coach mistakes out of the way and took a previously 0-12 team to a bowl game in his third season.

Then it was back to the NFL with the Bucs, where he served as offensive coordinator, and also receivers coach his first two years. In his final season in Tampa in 2018, Monken rewrote the offensive record books and established himself as a formidable play-caller.

The Browns came calling in 2019 to help round out Freddie Kitchens’ staff, and Berry, then Browns vice president of player personnel, was his point of contact.

“He actually was the first gentleman I met with when I came in the building,” Monken said. “And I could tell right away that our alignment, and his clear vision for how you build the roster and how you develop players, we were aligned.”

Unfortunately for Monken and the Browns, Kitchens in way over his head in that 6-10 season, and Monken, the non-play-calling coordinator, was left to try to answer for Kitchens’ game-day mistakes.

“We created distractions,” Monken said on a Ravens Coaching Academy video. “Every week was like a made-for-television show in 2019. We ended up earning what we got, a one-and-done. And it wasn’t because of talent.”

Monken fled back to the college ranks in 2020, taking the offensive coordinator job at Georgia under Kirby Smart. In 2021 and 2022, they won back-to-back national championships, with Monken’s offenses among the most explosive in the nation.

But the lure back to the NFL was strong, with Monken aspiring to be a head coach at the highest level.

“I called around to coaches in the NFL,” he said. “I wanted to hear what it was like to be a head coach in the NFL … I got ahold of three or four other coaches, Kevin (Stefanski) being one of them, and I asked them, ‘Do you enjoy being a head coach in the NFL? Do you enjoy everything that comes with it?’ It’s not easy. It isn’t.

“And to a man, all of them said they loved it. Be it Matt LaFleur, be it Kevin Stefanski and others that I reached out to, because it was the only reason for me to leave Georgia. Why else would I leave Georgia? We were winning, gonna have good players, the culture’s already set.”

The other part was the challenge of elevating Lamar Jackson into more of an elite passer, which Monken, the Ravens offensive coordinator from 2023-25, achieved from the jump. Jackson earned his second AP NFL MVP award in Monken’s first year, and led the NFL with a 119.6 rating the year after when he threw 41 touchdown passes against only four interceptions.

“I owe a lot to the players that were there and the coaching staff that we put together to help us do that,” he said. “Ultimately that was my goal, to come back, to put yourself in a position to one day sit in this chair, be one of the 32.”

He counts John Harbaugh and Smart as two of his biggest influences in the game.

“When you talk about getting a doctorate in coaching, wow – I owe a lot to them,” Monken said. “They entrusted me to elevate the offenses at both places, which is a credit to the staff we had and the players we had, because you can’t do it alone. It takes an army.”

One of his biggest takeaways was how to manage all of the situations that detract from winning football.

“They get to the same point; they just do it differently,” Monken said. “I owe a lot to Coach Harbaugh … He’s elite at messaging with a team, especially with an NFL team, and how you deal with players and how you confront anything that gets in the way of winning without being confrontational. To me, that’s an art.”

Harbaugh was so beholden to Monken that he tried to talk him out of taking the Browns head coaching job and joining Harbaugh with the Giants as coordinator instead. In fact, Harbaugh waited 24 long days for him, watching other coordinators get snatched up.

But Monken, the strong No. 1 of choice of the whole search committee, wouldn’t have passed this up for the world. Not only did he think he’d never walk into Browns headquarters again after the mess of 2019, he questioned if anyone would ever give him a chance at the head job.

It’s why this opportunity is even more meaningful to him, similar to when Bruce Arians got his first head coaching gig at 60 and went on to win a Super Bowl with the Bucs.

“For sure,” Monken said of being extra grateful. “I mean, I’m not getting any younger, let’s be real honest here. Although I’ll say this, that the version you’re getting of me now is a hell of a lot better than it would have been 15, 20 years ago.”

After doing their diligence and interviewing nine other candidates, the Browns unanimously agreed on Monken as their 19th head coach, selected from a pool of three finalists including Schwartz and Rams pass game coordinator Nate Scheelhaase. They gave him a five-year contract worth $50 million or more, with the going rate for head coaches these days being $10 million to $20 million a year.

“Todd stood head and shoulders above the rest,” Berry said. “Todd’s really, really unique. If you look at his career history, this is a coach who has had high level, innovative, adaptable offenses at both the pro and college level … It became very apparent in everybody that we talked to about Todd how strong he was working and developing with young players.”

The job won’t be without its challenges. Right off the bat, Monken has had to deal with the unceremonious exit of Schwartz, who packed up his office the day he was passed over for the head job last week, telling staffers he’s not coming back.

Monken, earning the job primarily for his plan to transform the points-challenged offense, talked to Schwartz, presumably in a face-to-face meeting Monday at club headquarters, but declined to reveal whether or not he plans to return. Haslam said the matter is ongoing, but Monken made it clear that the premier defense will march on even if Schwartz, who’s under contract for two more years, decides to retire.

“First off, my anticipation is we’re not going to change the system,” he said. “We’re built for the system that they’re in currently. We’re still going to let them attack; we’re still going to let them play free. I can’t see any other way. They’re a big reason why I took this job, the defensive players. I didn’t take this job because of Jim Schwartz. I have a lot of respect for Jim Schwartz, as I would hope he has for me.”

“… (but) when I was preparing for the Cleveland Browns, I wasn’t trying to chip Jim Schwartz, I was chipping Myles Garrett … “

He’ll also have to identify his QB1 for next season and beyond, whether it’s 2025 fifth-round pick Shedeur Sanders, three-time Pro Bowler Deshaun Watson, or a QB to be named later. On his first day at the office on Friday, Monken met Sanders and reminded him that the Ravens “tried to draft your (expletive)” three spots before the Browns traded up to select him at No. 144. “It all worked out,” he said.

But he wasn’t ready to commit to Sanders as his starter for ’26 during the opening press conference.

“Like any position on the team, that’s still to be determined,” Monken said. “Am I excited about Shedeur? Am I excited about all the quarterbacks in the room? Am I excited to coach this football team? Absolutely. I can’t wait for them to get back and for us to get started.”

He acknowledged that he’s “intrigued” by Watson, and eager to see what can do when healthy. He also has plenty of draft capital and cap space to build to the offense from the ground up, which is one of the main reasons he took the job.

Haslam concurred with Berry that Monken was “at the top of the list the entire time. I think our search lasted (24) days. And I’d say he was leading the pack or in the front pack the whole time.”

He said fans caught a glimpse of the authentic Monken in his presser, tears, expletives and all.

“You see the emotion, you see the faith, you see the drive, the work ethic, the confidence,” he said. “What you saw for the 25 minutes he was up there today, that’s Todd Monken.”

Haslam made it clear that the 8-26 record of the past two seasons won’t do going forward.

“Do I expect we’ll win more games? I do,” Haslam said. “And I think we’ll have a better football team. We’re not going to be ugly to watch, okay? And I actually take that seriously. We want it to be a fun team to watch, a team that plays hard, plays smart and most of all, wins.”

If Monken can deliver, the only tears in Browns Town will be tears of joy.

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