It’s the suits. If there’s one anecdote that best describes new Cleveland Browns head coach Todd Monken, it’s probably the story about the suits.
Before the Browns took a chance on him, Jeff Hammond was the only person in America who trusted Monken to run a football program. Hammond is a retired U.S. Army major general and the athletic director who hired Monken as the head coach at Southern Miss in 2013. I reached out to Hammond to learn what he saw in Monken that everyone else apparently missed.
Hammond told me about the suits.
During his three seasons in Hattiesburg, Miss., Monken paid to have business suits tailored for every graduating senior on the football team. Southern Miss has sent its share of players to the NFL over the years, but it isn’t known as a hotbed of pro talent. Monken wanted his players to be ready for the world ahead of them, and that meant prepping them for their first real-life job interviews by ensuring they looked the part.
“He tried to set these kids up for success because he cared,” Hammond said. “Unlike a lot of guys I’ve seen, he authentically cared about his players and their lives and their future, and they knew that and responded to that positively. I haven’t talked to him in years, and I know the NFL is so much different than the college world, but Cleveland is getting a guy that’s going to be committed.”
Monken, who turned 60 last month, will be one of the oldest first-time head coaches in NFL history. David Culley, who was 65 when the Houston Texans hired him in 2021, holds the record, while Vic Fangio and Bruce Arians were each 60 when they got their first head-coaching jobs in the league. Monken appears to be enjoying the honeymoon phase as a new coach, and he grinned widely throughout his time in Indianapolis at the NFL combine.
As he stepped to the podium to meet with reporters at the combine, he stood between the two coaches who recently appeared in the Super Bowl: the New England Patriots’ Mike Vrabel and the Seattle Seahawks’ Mike Macdonald. Vrabel is a decade younger than Monken and Macdonald is more than two decades younger, yet Monken was the coach who displayed anything like youthful enthusiasm about the occasion.
“How cool is this?” he said while looking around the room. “That’s a hell of a deal.”
Monken cleaned up one mess at Southern Miss and is now facing another. The Browns have the NFL’s lowest-scoring offense over the last two years, they recently rebuilt much of their offensive line through free agency and their quarterback room is statistically the worst in the NFL.
Browns quarterbacks Shedeur Sanders, Deshaun Watson and Dillon Gabriel have the three worst EPA-per-dropback numbers in the league over the last two seasons (minimum six starts), according to TruMedia.
The situation in Cleveland isn’t that different from what Monken encountered 13 years ago, when he began the only other head-coaching job of his career.
Southern Miss football hit bottom in 2012, and Hammond had to find the right mechanic to rebuild the program. He had been the assistant athletic director in 2012 and was part of the search committee that selected Ellis Johnson as head coach. Southern Miss is a proud football program that went 12-2 and won its conference in Larry Fedora’s final season in 2011, and the Golden Eagles hadn’t endured a losing season since 1993.
That is, until Johnson went 0-12 in his lone season in charge and was subsequently fired. One of the candidates he’d beaten out for the job in the previous offseason was Monken.
By the time Johnson was fired, Hammond had taken over as athletic director and led the search for a replacement. The hiring committee interviewed at least five candidates and maybe six, including a few with ties to Southern Miss. Hammond wasn’t convinced that any of them was right for the job, and he was becoming frustrated with the process. He didn’t know much about Monken, but he remembered him from the previous hiring cycle.
“I’m a soldier, and we’re always looking for guys that are laser-focused — guys that know what they want to accomplish, have a firmness or purpose — and that’s the thing I remembered most about his (first) interview,” Hammond said. “You look in his eyes when he spoke, and he’d look you right in the eyes. He was communicating directly, with a determination that reminded me in many ways of a combat leader who just got his mission and was giving his brief back before he took his troops forward.”
So Hammond picked up the phone and asked Monken, who was the offensive coordinator at Oklahoma State, to interview again.
Hammond remembers Monken being a bit gruff on the call. He basically told Hammond that Southern Miss had the opportunity to hire him the year before and didn’t, so why should Monken waste his time by going through another interview?
Nevertheless, Hammond convinced him to try again. Monken happened to be on a recruiting visit that allowed him to arrive in Hattiesburg the next day. He walked back into the Southern Miss offices and dazzled everyone.
“No notes. He spoke from his head, from his heart, and it was brilliant,” Hammond said. “After going through other guys who had these big presentations — obviously, they were rehearsed — Todd came in with no preparation and wowed everyone.”
The way that Monken was short with Hammond on their first call should surprise no one. Monken is as smooth as sandpaper. His factory setting is blunt honesty. He doesn’t play office politics, perhaps to his detriment, but those who know him insist he is always straight with others. Ask him a question and be prepared for an unfiltered answer.
How that plays with the Browns’ quarterback room remains to be seen. It’s no secret that his relationship with Lamar Jackson wore thin at times during the past three seasons, when Monken was offensive coordinator for the Baltimore Ravens. Monken might have been leaving Baltimore after last season even if John Harbaugh had remained as head coach.
Hammond, who played quarterback at Southern Miss in the 1970s, believes one of Monken’s best attributes is his ability to evaluate quarterbacks. At Southern Miss, the coach quickly identified a lightly recruited, undersized prospect from Hoover, Ala., named Nick Mullens as the quarterback he wanted. Hammond thought Monken was crazy when he met Mullens at a recruiting breakfast.
“I turned to my wife and said, ‘What the hell?’” Hammond recalled. “But I watched him develop the kid. He knew exactly what he was looking for. He knew how to develop quarterbacks. And the reason Mullens was able to develop was because he was an exceptional student of the game who was willing to open up and listen. He responded to Todd’s coaching, and look what happened.”
Mullens departed Southern Miss as a four-year starter. He still holds the school’s single-season and career records for passing yards and touchdowns. He has since played eight seasons in the NFL, primarily as a backup.
Whether Monken can have that type of success in Cleveland might be up to Sanders, who for now remains the presumptive favorite to start. Monken’s ability to revive the offense, no matter the quarterback, will go a long way in determining how long he sticks around.
For now, he has the only job he ever wanted: NFL head coach. The man who gave him the opportunity to lead a program more than a decade ago is surprised it took this long.
“I’ve always wondered why he never got a chance,” Hammond said. “Some people might say he’s a little rough around the edges. I would call it something different. He’s authentic. He’s not going to shade his thoughts or his views. He probably would never survive in the political world of D.C., you know? It’s not his way.”