BALTIMORE — In the football coaching firmament, there are wizards — Mouse Davis with his run-and-shoot offense, Hal Mumme and Mike Leach with the “Air Raid” — celebrated more for their schematic innovations than for the games they won. Then, there are adapters: coaches who do not invent the tools but know precisely which one to pull out of the bag in a given situation.
Todd Monken, the Ravens’ new offensive coordinator, is an adapter.
Give him a fleet of gifted wide receivers — Mike Evans, Chris Godwin and Adam Humphries on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — and he’ll throw the ball all over creation. Hand him a pair of star tight ends and a versatile backfield like he had last season at Georgia and you won’t know which way he’s going to beat you.
“Todd is one of the top-five coordinators in football, college or pro,” said Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy, who worked with Monken from 2002 to 2004 and again in 2011 and 2012. “If you just start gathering experience, knowledge, production, work ethic, intelligence, all those things — I’ve never been in pro football, so maybe it’s a little bit unfair for me to say, but he’s top five in all of football in my opinion.”
“He’s going to build the offense around the best players, whoever they are,” said Chip Lindsey, who served as Monken’s offensive coordinator at Southern Miss in 2014 and 2015. A tantalizing thought if the Ravens sign quarterback Lamar Jackson, one of the most dynamic talents in the sport, to a long-term extension.
Like so many of his coaching brethren, Monken, 57, has led a nomadic existence, taking jobs in two- and three-year doses for the last quarter century. In some cases, he had to move on because the head coaches who hired him were fired. Just as often — see his move from Georgia to the Ravens — he jumped toward a fresh challenge.
Players and coaches who know Monken say he’s a guy you’d want to have a beer with: smart as hell, opinionated and funny. He’s also a hardened realist. “This is a business,” he told Yahoo Sports while he was at Georgia. “I’ve done organizations where [they’ve said] ‘This is a family.’ This isn’t a family. You’re going to fire me if we suck, so don’t say it’s a family.”
Ravens coach John Harbaugh warmed to the very qualities so many of Monken’s past colleagues have described. Harbaugh’s team has made the playoffs four of the past five years and racked up historic rushing totals under previous offensive coordinator Greg Roman. In searching for Roman’s replacement, he sought a medic, not an inventor.
“I guess the biggest part for me — character obviously, relationships obviously — but [it was] the ability to focus on building an offense around the talent that you have,” Harbaugh said in explaining why Monken stood out from a mass of 14 candidates. “[It’s] not necessarily a one-system type of an approach like, ‘This is our system and we fit the players to the system,’ but a player-driven approach that, ‘We’re going to build the system around the players and around the personality of the team.’ ”
Monken had one foot in the coaching game almost from the day he was born in Wheaton, Ill. His dad, Bob, was a Hall of Fame coach at Lake Park High School in the Chicago suburbs. His brothers, Ted and Tony, were headed down the same path, as was his cousin, Jeff, who’s now the coach at Army.
From early on, he developed a sense that players, not coaches, should dictate the nature of a team and program.
“All my heroes were my dad’s players,” Monken said. “This one thing I did learn from my dad and some coaches — and you try to tell that to the players and coaches — is that young people’s favorite players at first start off to be the best players, but then eventually, it’s the ones that make you feel special. So, that’s your job, is to make people feel special. That’s why you have a job, is to create the best version of them. The moment we forget that, we’re wrong; we’re dead wrong.”
Monken was an All-American quarterback at Division III Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., where his Hall of Fame plaque describes him as “truly a picture of the perfect play-caller.” He moved immediately to his first job as a graduate assistant at Grand Valley State in Michigan. Next came a similar role on Lou Holtz’s staff at Notre Dame, which led to a seven-year stint, Monken’s longest in a single place, at Eastern Michigan. After another stop at Louisiana Tech, he went to Oklahoma State to help Gundy, then a rising offensive coordinator, build his passing offense.
“With Todd, he just has a really high level of intelligence,” Gundy said, recalling his early impressions. “You can talk about sports, you can talk about politics, you can talk about horses, you can talk about offense, whatever it may be — some people are just smart.”
By the time he returned to Stillwater, Okla., in 2011 for his shot at coordinating the Cowboys’ rapid-fire offense, Monken had put in an additional six years as wide receivers coach for Les Miles at LSU and then for Jack Del Rio with the Jacksonville Jaguars.
“I like guys that had worked their way up and paid the price to get where they are,” Gundy said. “I knew he was ready to be a coordinator. He just gets it.”
Quarterback Brandon Weeden was a grown man who had attempted a baseball career before taking the reins of Gundy’s offense. He had thrown for 4,277 yards as a junior. So he wasn’t looking for a guru to reinvent his game or Oklahoma State’s “Air Raid” attack when Monken came along.
“I think the good ones don’t come in and say, ‘This is my system, we’re going to run it hell or high water,’ ” Weeden said. “He came in and learned our system, then took the pieces that were in place and made us better.”
He laughed, recalling their first telephone conversation: “I think we were on the phone 53 minutes and Monken talked probably 51 of them. You come to love him. He’s very transparent, a great storyteller. I just always felt comfortable talking to him.”
The Cowboys averaged 48.7 points and 545.8 yards per game. Weeden completed 72.4% of his passes and became a first-round draft pick to the Cleveland Browns.
Gundy noticed that Monken’s quick mind in conversation transferred to his play-calling, where defensive coordinators rarely caught him off guard. He had a counter for every assault.
“He’s gonna work with the talent he’s got,” Gundy said. “When he was here with Weeden; Weeden was a pure pocket passer, so we were ‘Air Raid,’ and there was no quarterback run involved. He took advantage of Brandon’s arm strength. But you’ll see other years where the quarterback run will come more into play, more play-action passes will come into play. He can be in 10-personnel, 11-personnel, 12-personnel. He’s had dual-threat guys, pocket guys, young guys, veteran guys. That’s why [the Ravens] made a really good hire.”
Monken’s one shot as a head coach entailed a massive rebuild at Southern Miss, which had gone 0-12 the year before he was hired and won just one game in his first season. That total rose to three in Year 2, when Lindsey joined Monken’s staff as offensive coordinator.
“He had been building that thing from the ground up,” Lindsey recalled. “It was really bad.”
Monken had something brewing, however, with quarterback Nick Mullens, who’d played for Lindsey in high school and would go on to the NFL, where he’s now a reserve heading into free agency. With Mullens throwing for more than 4,000 yards and future NFL running backs Ito Smith and Jalen Richard each running for more than 1,000, the Golden Eagles averaged 40 points a game and went 9-5 in Monken’s third season.
He figured it out.
“He was a great recruiter because he connected with anyone he was talking to,” said Lindsey, now the offensive coordinator at North Carolina. “Then, when you started talking football, you realized his football IQ was as high as anyone’s. I learned so much.”
He watched Monken spark with Mullens for a simple reason; neither could get enough of “talking ball” as the Golden Eagles quested after explosive plays.
“Guys that don’t want to learn the game, they might struggle with him, but if you love what you’re doing, you’re going to love him,” Lindsey said. “He can connect with the players. He’s hard on them, he holds them accountable, he gets after them, but he’s very fair.”
Monken left Southern Miss in 2016 to become coach Dirk Koetter’s offensive coordinator with the Buccaneers. He had been wide receivers coach when Koetter was offensive coordinator with the Jaguars from 2007 to 2010, and Koetter could not think of a better person to connect with Tampa Bay’s gifted young wide receivers, led by future Pro Bowl selection Evans.
“That’s an art in and of itself,” Koetter said. “I just think ‘Monk’ has a really good ability to be demanding but yet be a guy who’s fun to be around. He can get those guys laughing … and then the other thing is he does a really good job finding ways to help individual players improve on fundamentals they need to work on. What do players want? They want coaches who can help them reach their full potential. ‘Monk’s’ good at that.”
He would prove it again at Georgia.
The Bulldogs had gone 44-12 over coach Kirby Smart’s first four years but were known primarily for their bevy of future NFL defenders when Monken signed on in 2020 after a frustrating 2019 as offensive coordinator (but not play-caller) for the Browns.
“I’ll let you do what you want to do,” Smart told him and kept his promise.
The staff kept trying to find quarterbacking alternatives to Stetson Bennett, a 5-foot-11 former walk-on. Bennett kept forcing his way back into the picture, and Monken eventually threw his full faith behind this unremarkable physical specimen. Read-options, play-action, designed quarterback runs, sweeps to ultra-athletic tight end Brock Bowers — the Bulldogs succeeded with them all, finishing ninth in the country in scoring in 2021 and fifth in 2022 as they won two consecutive national championships.
“I feel like before he got here, I didn’t really understand football,” Bennett told Yahoo Sports shortly before the Bulldogs won their second straight national championship with a 65-7 thrashing of TCU.
“Well, that’s way too much,” Monken said, deflecting credit back to the player.
Monken could have stayed in Athens, basking in the Bulldogs’ success and earning the highest salary of any college assistant in the country. But friends said they were not surprised he leaped at another challenge. “I know he always was burning inside to get back to the NFL,” Koetter said. “What else was he going to do at Georgia? Win three in a row? To be around the best players and best coaches in the world, I think a lot of us have been driven by that.”
The uncertainty around Jackson’s future in Baltimore — he could be traded, sign an extension or play 2023 on the franchise tag — is a wild card in Monken’s planning. But those who’ve watched him build mighty offenses around lesser talents can’t help but be excited imagining what he might do with the 2019 NFL Most Valuable Player.
“If they sign him long-term, then Todd’s going to use Lamar Jackson differently than he’s been used before,” Gundy said. “Todd is going to figure out whatever he does best and how he does it best. The difference with Todd is he’s going to find a way for him to run the football that can stress a defense, and then he’s going to tie the play-action pass in with it and do things that can exploit a defense based on all his abilities, not just his running ability.”
Sweet melody to the ears of Ravens fans and NFL analysts who struggled to find a connection between Roman’s exceptional run designs and his less productive passing concepts.
“He’s not going to ask Lamar to do things that Lamar either doesn’t like doing or doesn’t feel like he can do,” said Weeden, who played five seasons as an NFL quarterback. “He’s so good at making people comfortable. That could be a scary little duo, man. They’re both really good at what they do.”
