Todd Monken was hired as the Cleveland Browns’ first-time head coach in January 2026. He has not coached a single regular season snap.
He has been on the job for approximately four months. And according to Fox Sports NFL reporter Henry McKenna, he is already on a hot seat, along with general manager Andrew Berry, before a single game has been played.
“The Browns can’t really afford to tank, not with GM Andrew Berry and head coach Todd Monken on hot seats,” McKenna wrote. “Yeah, that’s right, they could both get fired. Monken hasn’t coached a single down yet, but the Browns struggled to attract a top candidate in the 2026 hiring cycle, mainly because of the team’s salary cap issues and quarterback issues, which all tie back to Watson.”
The Cleveland Browns have reached a point in their franchise history where a head coach can be declared on the hot seat before his first preseason game. That is where the Deshaun Watson era has left them.
How Todd Monken Got Here
Monken comes to Cleveland after three seasons as the Baltimore Ravens’ offensive coordinator, a stint that included helping Lamar Jackson to his second NFL MVP in 2023 and establishing himself as one of the most accomplished offensive minds in football.
Before Baltimore, he won back-to-back national championships at the University of Georgia in 2021 and 2022. He served as the Browns’ offensive coordinator once before, under Freddie Kitchens in 2019.
He replaced Kevin Stefanski, who was fired after six seasons in Cleveland despite two playoff appearances and two Coach of the Year awards.
Stefanski’s departure came after the Browns went 8-26 over his final two seasons, a collapse directly tied to the Deshaun Watson catastrophe rather than to any failure of coaching philosophy.
The Browns’ coaching search was lengthy and reportedly difficult. Salary cap issues created by the Watson contract made the position less attractive than it should have been for a team with legitimate defensive talent and draft capital.
Several top candidates reportedly pulled out or declined interviews. The search came down to Monken and former defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz.
The Browns chose Monken, described by many observers as a dark-horse candidate, rather than the more experienced known quantity.
Monken had widely been expected to follow John Harbaugh from Baltimore to the New York Giants as offensive coordinator when Harbaugh left the Ravens for New York.
He chose the Browns head coaching job instead. Whether that decision looks prescient or painful will depend entirely on how the 2026 season unfolds.
The Quarterback Problem That Defines Cleveland
The most immediate and most important challenge Monken faces is the one that destroyed his predecessor’s tenure, the quarterback position.
The Browns currently have four quarterbacks on their roster, Deshaun Watson, Shedeur Sanders, Dillon Gabriel and rookie Taylen Green, and an open competition to determine which of them will start when the 2026 regular season begins.
Watson’s history with the Browns is one of the more complicated narratives in recent NFL history.
Cleveland acquired him in 2022 from the Houston Texans, trading three first-round picks in exchange for a quarterback who had more than 22 sexual misconduct allegations against him.
Watson received an 11-game suspension, then returned and went 7-5 as a starter in 2023 before suffering a torn shoulder in the second game of 2024.
He came back from that surgery and went 1-6 before tearing his Achilles tendon in October 2024 and re-tearing it in January 2025. He did not play at all in 2025.
Owner Jimmy Haslam publicly admitted last offseason that the Watson acquisition was a “miss” for the organization.
Despite all of that, Watson remains under contract and in the starting quarterback competition.
He led most drills in the team’s voluntary minicamp in April and Mary Kay Cabot of Cleveland.com reported he had the “inside track” to being the Week 1 starter.
Monken’s response to that report was carefully noncommittal. On Cleveland radio station 92.3 The Fan, he said he would love to have a starting quarterback identified before training camp but acknowledged that he simply was not there yet.
“I would love to have that. I’m not there yet, so I can’t say that,” Monken said. “We’ve been on the field three practices, which was awesome to get out there with our players.”
He added more context in the same interview that captured exactly how he is approaching a situation he had no role in creating. “It’s always changing based on what you see,” he said. “I don’t have a history with any of our players. They’re all external to me. The point is what I’ve seen after three days, okay, that gives us a little bit of a 40,000-foot view of where we’re at. But that can change.”
Monken has indicated he hopes to name a starter by the end of the team’s mandatory minicamp, scheduled for June 9-11. OTAs begin in mid-May.
Deshaun Watson vs Shedeur Sanders
The brutally honest assessment of the Browns’ quarterback situation is that neither option provides a comfortable answer.
Watson has not played a full healthy season in Cleveland. His career record with the Browns is 9-10.
He has thrown 19 touchdowns and 12 interceptions while completing 61.2 percent of his passes.
Every statistic is from a version of him that was either injured, coming back from injury or about to be injured.
The version of Watson that Cleveland acquired in 2022, a Super Bowl-caliber quarterback worth three first-round picks, has never actually shown up.
Sanders made his NFL debut as a fifth-round pick in 2025, falling dramatically from his projected draft position due to concerns about his attitude and work ethic during the pre-draft process.
He started the final seven games of 2025, completing 56.6 percent of his passes for 1,400 yards, seven touchdowns and ten interceptions.
The Browns went 3-4 in those starts. His statistical profile ranked among the worst for quarterbacks who played significant minutes in 2025. He is young enough to develop but is far from a proven commodity.
The third option, Dillon Gabriel, provides depth but has not established himself as an NFL starter. The fourth option, rookie Taylen Green, is a developmental project at this stage.
Monken is managing a quarterback room that has no clear answer and two options that range from “deeply uncertain” to “genuinely problematic.”
His ability to extract something viable from that situation, whether through developing Sanders, reviving Watson, or finding creative ways to compensate for whoever the starting quarterback is, is the central test of his first season.
Why Is Monken Already In The Hot Seat?
McKenna’s hot-seat observation sounds provocative because it puts a first-time head coach on the firing line before he has coached a single game.
But the logic behind it is more structural than it is a commentary on Monken personally.
The Browns have 10 draft picks in 2027, and the 2027 quarterback class is widely considered significantly deeper and more talented than the 2026 class.
If the Browns struggle in 2026, which is a realistic outcome given the quarterback uncertainty and the 8-26 record over the past two seasons, they could emerge from a disappointing season with a high draft pick, 10 picks for 2027, and an opportunity to select a franchise quarterback and potentially attract a more established head coach.
The incentive structure, in other words, creates a scenario where a disappointing first year for Monken might also represent a clearing of the deck for a more aggressive rebuilding effort.
That is not an accusation that anyone is planning to fail, it is a recognition that the organizational mathematics of 2026 put Monken in a position where both success and failure have specific implications for his future with the team.
McKenna was clear that it was not inevitable. The Browns could have the kind of first season under Monken that changes the calculation entirely.
A strong young team with the right development from whoever starts at quarterback, a healthy offensive line following the significant additions of Elgton Jenkins, Tytus Howard and Zion Johnson in free agency, and a receiving corps upgraded with KC Concepcion and Denzel Boston in the draft, all of that could produce a season that makes the hot seat narrative look premature.
The Offensive Rebuild Around Monken
The Browns have invested significantly in giving Monken something to work with.
The offensive line overhaul is the most important piece, Jenkins, Howard and Johnson were all acquired in free agency to address what had been one of the league’s worst units.
First-round pick Spencer Fano, a tackle from Utah taken ninth overall, adds additional protection.
At receiver, Jerry Jeudy remains the established veteran target. KC Concepcion (24th overall, Texas A&M) and Denzel Boston (39th overall, Washington) were added in the first two rounds of the 2026 draft to inject speed and size that the position group had desperately needed.
The additions mean that whoever starts at quarterback, Watson, Sanders or someone else, will have the best surrounding offensive cast the Browns have assembled in years.
Monken will also introduce an offensive system he has not had the opportunity to install since his days in Baltimore, where it was built around Lamar Jackson’s specific skill set.
Adapting that system for whoever the Browns ultimately choose to start is one of the first authentically novel challenges of his head coaching career.
OTAs Begin In Mid-May
The Browns begin OTAs in mid-May with the mandatory minicamp following June 9-11 and training camp arriving in late July.
By Monken’s own timeline, he expects to have a quarterback identified by the end of minicamp in June, though he was careful not to commit to that deadline when pressed on it.
“Once we get back on the field for four weeks at the end of this spring, we’ll have a better idea then,” he said. “But there’s only so many reps you get. Now that can still change, and that can change even if someone’s getting two-thirds of the reps to someone getting a third of the reps, because you’re still going to play preseason games. You’re still going to want to see those guys at quarterback and see how they play.”
Todd Monken has not coached a game for the Cleveland Browns. He is already on a hot seat. This is what it means to take the Cleveland Browns head coaching job in 2026.
